WIPO Global Innovation Index: Switzerland tops table 12th year running

Switzerland has topped the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Global Innovation Index 2022 (GII) for the twelfth year running. The USA moves up to second place, pushing Sweden down to third. The United Kingdom stays in fourth position, with the Netherlands coming in at fifth.

The GII is an annual ranking of the world’s economies based on 80+ indicators covering innovation capacity, output and support.

The latest edition focuses on the theme of innovation and productivity, and asks the question why, with science and innovation progress apparently growing, there is a slowdown in productivity?

As the report says:  “Economists and policymakers around the world have been worrying for decades about low productivity growth and how to turn this around using innovation – the theme of the GII 2022.”

One of the issues, the report concludes, is “the imperfect way intangible asset investments are accounted for… Indeed, a better capturing of intangible asset investments – particularly in the field of economic competencies – leads to an increase in official labor productivity measures”

One key suggestion the GII report makes to better understand the link between investment and productivity is to “work toward the better measurement of intangible assets, in particular so as to better cover the full spectrum of these assets… which are all still treated as intermediate inputs and thus go unmeasured.”

Inngot’s view is that IP and intangible assets directly contribute to company value – and that the way they are currently recorded in company balance sheets does not usually allow either management or outsiders to fully understand the true value they deliver.

Recent steps to help companies access the value of their own IP – for example, by using it as collateral for loans – are definitely welcome, but so far these have tended to concentrate on larger companies and larger loans.

That’s why we developed our online IP identification and valuation toolkit – to give SMEs access to IP valuations they can use to get the funds they need to grow quickly, easily and cost-effectively. It’s also why we are working with innovative lenders who already have IP-based finance products.

If intangibles are invisible, it’s difficult for anyone to understand what part they play in driving company turnover. Banks have been understandably reluctant to lend against something they can’t ‘see’ – and on a wider scale, as the WIPO GII says, without ways to measure intangibles, it is difficult to understand how they impact productivity.