GII 2025 ranking of the world’s top innovation clusters – China and US have most clusters, followed by Germany, India and the UK

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The GII also includes a chapter focus on a ranking of the world’s top Innovation clusters. This is based on local concentrations of innovation activity through the analysis of patent-filing activity, scientific article publication and venture capital (VC) activity, documenting the geographical areas around the world with the highest density of inventors, scientific authors and venture capitalists.

Each year, GII ranks the top 100 innovation clusters worldwide, using a bottom-up, data-driven methodology that disregards administrative or political borders and instead pinpoints those geographical areas where there is a high density of inventors and scientific authors. The clusters identified in this way often span several municipal districts, sub-federal states, and sometimes even two or more countries.

The GII 2025 top 100 innovation clusters are mainly concentrated in the following economies (with the number of clusters per country in brackets):

1. China: for the second consecutive year, leads with the most clusters (24)

2. The United States (22) with San Jose–San Francisco as the leading cluster

3. Germany (7) with Munich as the top cluster

4. India (4) with Bengaluru as the most innovative cluster

5. The United Kingdom (4) with London as the most significant cluster

This year’s report points out that the top 100 innovation clusters taken together are “accounting for roughly 70% of global PCT filings and VC deal activity, and around half of all scientific publications. This concentration becomes even more striking at the highest tier, with the leading 10 clusters alone generating around 40% of PCT filings, 35% of VC deal activity, and contributing over 15% of global scientific publications.”

The GII 2025 Top 5 Innovation Clusters

Japan and South Korea both make an appearance in this list:

1. Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou (China and Hong Kong, China)

2. Tokyo–Yokohama (Japan)

3. San Jose–San Francisco (United States)

4. Beijing (China)

5. Seoul (Republic of Korea)

When combined, Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou and Tokyo-Yokohama account for almost one in every five PCT applications filed globally.

Innovation clusters with most intensive activity

Innovation clusters with the most intensive innovation activity, in proportion to population density are:

1. San Jose–San Francisco cluster (United States)

2. Cambridge (United Kingdom)

3. Boston–Cambridge (United States)

4. Ningde (China)

5. Oxford (United Kingdom)

The clusters chapter can be found here.