Innovation and advanced technologies should be the calling card of any modern country that wants to position itself in the market globally. Of course, some countries manage to succeed even without being developed, but organizations such as WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, periodically draw up rankings that report the best countries in terms of innovation.
In this regard, a ranking of the world’s most innovative countries was recently published, within which the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is ranked 31st. Specifically, the UAE ranked in the 2022 Global Innovation Index (GII), moving up two places from 2021 and remaining ahead of other Arab nations.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar, for example, are respectively ranked in the 51st and the 52nd place.
However, WIPO does not just stop at ranking countries according to their level of innovation, but also offers detailed information on everything happening globally.
GII 2022: what WIPO tracked and how does it work?
To track levels of innovation, WIPO uses the Global Innovation Index (GII), which recorded ongoing trends against the backdrop of an ongoing pandemic, slowing productivity growth and other evolving challenges. Indeed, despite the fact that many thought the global pandemic might hinder investment on research, the data says otherwise.
Here are some of the key points tracked, showing that innovation and research have not stopped:
- More than 2 million scientific articles published in 2021
- R&D investment increased by 3.3%
- Companies that spend the most on R&D have increased their expenses by more than 11% and by nearly 10% in 2021, higher values than in 2019 before the pandemic.
- VC operations increased by 46% in 2021, registering similar levels to the Internet boom years
This makes clear how GII is not only a reference guide, but a powerful tool for building pro-innovation policies. It is enough to say that one of the last surveys claimed that on 110 countries that responded, more than 75 use the GII to improve their innovation ecosystem or as a specific reference in economic policymaking.
How UAE ranks in Global Innovation Index (GII)?
In addition to ranking 31st, the UAE rose to 18th place globally in the GII’s innovation input sub-index, five places higher than in 2021.
All this is a proof of how the country is able to transform investments by making them pay off and, most importantly, by implementing innovation policies to develop new resources, services and products that are technologically competitive.
Besides, UAE ranked:
- in 6th place in the Institutions indicator;
- in 7th place in the Infrastructure indicator;
- in 17th place in the Human Capital and Research indicator;
- in 23rd place for Market Sophistication;
- in 26th place for Enterprise Sophistication.
On top of that, the UAE ranked first in the world for:
- Cost of dismissal
- Entrepreneurial environment
- Policies and culture of entrepreneurship
- Tertiary education
- Incoming tertiary mobility
Finally, Emirates earned a good 2nd place for ” Percentage of research talents in enterprises“.
Conclusions
It is not easy at all to rank among the top in global innovation or, for that matter, to improve on previous years. The GII was created for this very reason: to provide a measuring tool for all those countries that want to take their economies back in hand by taking a cue from more developed realities.
For those who want to learn more, the official PDF of the Global Innovation Index 2022 can be found below.
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