South Korea Leads World in the newest Bloomberg Innovation Index of 2021Innovation as U.S. Exits Top Ten

2021-02-04

South Korea returned to first place in the latest Bloomberg Innovation Index of 2021, while the U.S. dropped out of a top 10 that features a cluster of European countries. Korea regained the crown from Germany, which dropped to fourth place. The Asian nation has now topped the index for seven of the nine years that it’s been published. Singapore and Switzerland each moved up one spot to rank second and third.

The annual index, published Wednesday, ranks the world’s 60 most innovative countries using seven criteria including research and development expenditure as a percentage of GDP, productivity, patent activity, concentration of researchers, including postgraduate Ph.D. students, engaged in R&D per one million people, concentration of high-tech companies, and tertiary education efficiency (the total enrollment in education, regardless of age, as a percentage of post-secondary cohort and the share of the labor force with an advanced level of education).


202102Bloomberg