India improves in global innovation ranking: study

 India has improved its innovation ranking in Global Innovation Index (GII) to reach 66th position from its last year’s rank of 81. The improvement in the rank comes after five years of continuous drop in its ranking.

Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Finland and Singapore lead the 2016 rankings in the GII, the report released jointly by Cornell University, INSEAD, World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), du and A T Kearney, and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) said.

Speaking at the launch jointly organised by NITI Aayog, DIPP and CII on Friday, Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, a team will be formed to look into the results of the GII to understand the challenges related to India and advice the government on the next step.

Along with its innovation performance, India’s innovation ranking is driven by methodological considerations, such as the addition of new indicators. Among its income group (lower-middle income), it ranks sixth and in its region (Central and Southern Asia), it ranks first.

India has shown a downward trajectory during the period of 2013-2015 in its ranking for inputs and outputs. This year, however, the rank in both inputs and outputs has increased significantly, reaching its best performance for the inputs over the four-year period.

India, 66th, is the top-ranked economy in Central and Southern Asia, showing particular strengths in tertiary education and R&D, including global R&D intensive firms, the quality of its universities and scientific publications, its market sophistication and ICT service exports where it ranks first in the world, according to the report.

India also over-performs in innovation relative to its GDP. It ranks second on innovation quality amongst middle-income economies, overtaking Brazil.