Science and Technology Cluster Ranking 2023

The world’s five biggest S&T clusters are all located in East Asia. Tokyo-Yokohama (Japan) leads as the largest global S&T cluster, followed by Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou (China and Hong Kong, China), Seoul (Republic of Korea), followed by China’s Beijing and Shanghai-Suzhou clusters.

The Cambridge cluster in the United Kingdom and San Jose-San Francisco, CA in the United States are found to be the clusters with the most intensive S&T activity, in proportion to population density, followed by Oxford (UK), Eindhoven (Netherlands) and Boston–Cambridge (US).

This year, the GII identifies 24 S&T clusters in China, up from the 21 last year, as the country boasting the greatest number of clusters, with Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou, Beijing Shanghai–Suzhou, and Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou and Nanjing leading.

The US has 21 among the top 100, Germany 9, and Japan, Canada, India and the Republic of Korea each have 4, with San Jose–San Francisco leading for the US, Munich for Germany, Tokyo-Yokohama for Japan, Toronto for Canada, Bengaluru for India, and Seoul for the Republic of Korea.

S&T clusters located in other middle-income economies besides China also saw strong S&T output growth, notably in India which has four top S&T clusters, with Chennai and Bengaluru experiencing the biggest increases in density of inventors and scientific authors.

S&T clusters in certain emerging economies grew at a particularly fast pace, including Brazil, India, Türkiye and, beyond the top 100, in Argentina, Egypt, Thailand and others.