Bloomberg has published its annual innovation index of the world’s leading countries in innovation. South Korea ranks first on the list in 2021 and the Asian nation has now topped the index for seven out of nine years that it’s been published. Singapore moved up a spot to rank 2nd while Sweden, Denmark, and Finland rank 5th, 6th, and 8ht respectively. China has fallen a spot and ranks 16th just behind Norway that ranks 15th on the index.
The index is based on an analysis conducted by the US news and market data agency Bloomberg every year, based on seven parameters. These include higher education, patents, money spent on development, and the number of high-tech companies per. inhabitant.
This year, the underlying data comes primarily from the time before the corona crisis, but Bloomberg itself points out that many of the high-ranking countries, e.g. South Korea, Germany, and Israel are also countries that have handled the crisis relatively well.
The 2021 rankings reflect a world where the fight against Covid-19 has brought innovation to the forefront, Bloomberg writes: From governments’ efforts to control the pandemic over the digital infrastructure that has allowed economies to work their way through it, and to the race to develop vaccines to combat it.
Bloomberg collects information from The World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, and Unesco as they try each year to decide how to place the countries on the index. This year, it ended with a top 10 exit for the USA, which ended in 11th place. European countries, in turn, occupy seven of the index’s top ten places, and Asian nations occupy two.
