Innovation Is Growing More International, WIPO Report Shows

The location of urban innovation hubs from around the world is pretty well-known even to everyday consumers. Further, there has been little change in where these hubs can be found over the past few decades. While Silicon Valley stalwarts like Google and Facebook may not be more than a generation old, high-tech development in that region goes back at least as far as the 1950s. The tech sector in Tokyo has also remained strong since it first reached prominence in the latter half of the 20th century.

In more recent years, however, technological innovation has begun to spread out from these centers to create a more dispersed global innovation ecosystem, according to the World Intellectual Property Report 2019, recently released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Titled The Geography of Innovation: Local Hotspots, Global Networks, this report shows that, while innovation hubs continue to be found in densely populated urban centers, the stranglehold that certain countries have had on global innovation is relaxing. More nations are joining the ranks of the world's top innovation hubs.

Between 1970 and 2000, two-thirds of the world's patenting activity originated from three countries: the United States, Japan and Germany. A full 90 percent of global patent filing activity during that period came from the combination of those three countries and the rest of Western Europe. But as strong economies have taken hold in other countries, the geographical sources of patenting activity has spread to those areas. For example, while China and South Korea combined only accounted for 3 percent of global patent filing between 1990 and 1999, those two countries were the source of 20 percent of patent filings from 2015 to 2017.

Research and development sectors - limited to urban centers

Despite the growing number of countries which are contributing to global innovation, robust research and development sectors continue to be limited to urban population centers. About one-quarter of U.S. patents filed worldwide between 2011 and 2015 originated from Boston, New York and San Francisco, while more than half of Chinese patents during that period came from population hotspots Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai. Less than 20 percent of all patent filing surveyed for the WIPO report originated from inventors who were located outside of urban locations or niche technology clusters.

At the same time, a large population does not guarantee that a particular...