“Innovation rankings are a mirror — useful only if you're willing to look closely.”
WIPO released the 19th Global Innovation Index on 29 September 2026, ranking 139 economies, with a special focus on entrepreneurs at the frontier of science: science-based start-ups and university spin-outs.
It's tempting to treat innovation indices as academic exercises that live and die in a press release. They don't.
The GII has become a genuine reference point for how investors and policymakers benchmark which markets are worth betting on — and IP infrastructure is one of the inputs that quietly shapes that ranking.
This year's launch also introduces the Dealroom-WIPO Deep Science Startup Tracker, which WIPO describes as the first global mapping of deep science startups (more than 30,000 founded since 2000) — worth watching if you advise deep-tech founders.
We'll be watching where our region lands, and what it says about the gap between the ideas we generate and the IP infrastructure we build around them.
Source: World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Global Innovation Index 2026