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SINGAPORE – For the seventh year in a row, Singapore has held the top spot as the most innovative nation in Asia-Pacific in the latest Global Innovation Index.
The annual index, published by the World Intellectual Property Organization, Cornell University and Insead, ranks 131 economies based on their ability and success in innovation.
The ranking is based on 80 indicators, including the creation of mobile applications and the ease of starting a business.
The indicators are classified into categories of “inputs” or “outputs”: inputs refer to the elements of a national economy that allow innovative activities and outputs refer to the results of the innovative activities of the economies.
Singapore performed well on traditionally strong input indicators such as political and operational stability, government effectiveness, and tertiary education, ranking first globally for all of them.
Singapore also improved on intellectual property (IP) related product indicators that measure ease of filing and patent protection.
Ms Rena Lee, Executive Director of the Singapore Intellectual Property Office (Ipos), said in a statement on Thursday (September 3): “Ipos’s digital efforts, which are part of the national transformation roadmap digital, have been accelerated by Covid -19 and continue to strengthen our position as a center of innovation. “
In addition to being fully digital for all of its IP application services since 2014, Ipos has enhanced its mobile application for trademark applications and has held fully virtual IP dispute hearings, among other things, he added.
“Ipos continually innovates to give companies a business advantage during the pandemic, where time is of the essence,” he said.
Interestingly, the city-state also greatly improved for the indicator that measures the proportion of female employees with advanced degrees, out of total employees, climbing 35 places to occupy the first position in the world. According to the report, this indicator, in addition to providing a look at the nation’s labor distribution by gender, “offers more information on the degree of sophistication of the local human capital currently employed.”
In the overall global ranking of the Innovation Index, Singapore ranks eighth, with the top three for Switzerland, Sweden and the United States.
But the country performed relatively weakly on production indicators, such as domestic feature films (No. 61) and infocomm’s technology service exports (No. 50).
Dr. Bruno Lanvin, Insead’s executive director of global indices and co-editor of the index, told The Straits Times: “A country that performs better in inputs than in outputs is basically a country that does not receive the reward that its efforts would deserve. “.
Despite the imbalance between entry and exit performance, which has persisted for some years, the city-state has maintained “great stability”.
Singapore also performed poorly on the education spending indicator, as a share of gross domestic product. While Dr. Lanvin said this is an important indicator for many countries, as it tracks the “political will of governments to make education a priority,” it does not apply to the Republic.
He said: “In the case of Singapore, as in the case of Switzerland, it is a bit misleading, as a well-managed education system may not require a higher level of public spending.”
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