Innovation Capabilities

Innovation ecosystems are like bands: they start with a few key players, each bringing their own specialized skills. The most sophisticated ecosystems evolve into symphonic orchestras, where a diverse set of highly specialized players work in harmony to create complex outputs that only a few can replicate.

Up-and-coming ecosystems are still in the process of finding their style. Strategically picking which instruments to add can help them, little by little, play this beautiful music too.

The technological advancements achieved during the last few decades, including breakthroughs in communication and digital infrastructure, have simplified the global exchange of ideas and technologies. Despite this, why do innovation ecosystems differ so much in their income levels? The answer lies in their innovation capabilities—the ability of an ecosystem to deliver competitive outputs in a field of the innovation process.

Innovation capabilities rely on the ability to absorb, apply, and adapt knowledge. These skills, expertise, and insights are often deeply embedded within the workforce and culture of a region, making them difficult to replicate elsewhere. These factors shape how innovation ecosystems evolve and respond to new opportunities, giving some regions a distinct advantage in certain fields.

Innovation capabilities insights

Find out more through our innovation capabilities insights.

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Most Economies Are Missing Hundreds of Thousands of Innovation Opportunities

Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann sitting with Intan Hamdan-Livramento from WIPO

Rethinking Innovation: How Economic Complexity Theory Reveals New Pathways to Growth

Преобразование знаний в технологии: отслеживание прогресса экосистем инноваций

Measuring Innovation Complexity—and Why It Matters

How can innovation capabilities help policymaking?

Measuring and understanding these innovation capabilities can allow policymakers to identify and support the unique potential within their ecosystems.

Unfolding the capability path

Examining the evolution of the ecosystem’s capabilities can help identify if the path to development is on the right track.

Assess current capabilities

Ecosystems can understand which of their capabilities are the most precious and look into ways of nurturing them.

Find new opportunities

Prioritize where to look for new, promising innovation capabilities that unlock their unique potential.

Tracking innovation capabilities worldwide

The Innovation Capabilities Outlook represents WIPO's commitment to understanding how the global innovation ecosystem evolves each year.

Each edition reveals which economies are expanding their repertoire, mastering new sophisticated capabilities, or struggling to keep pace with global trends. The Outlook tracks not just individual performance, but the broader patterns reshaping the global innovation landscape—from the rise of Asian innovation powerhouses to the systematic barriers preventing many economies from realizing their potential.

This annual intelligence enables policymakers, business leaders, and researchers to spot emerging opportunities, benchmark their progress against global trends, and adapt their strategies as innovation networks evolve. The analysis draws on billions of data points to map over 2,500 innovation capabilities, revealing the hidden connections that determine which economies thrive in the knowledge economy.

For researchers and analysts seeking to dive deeper into this data, the Innovation Capabilities Datasets are available through the WIPO Knowledge Repository, enabling custom analysis and research applications.

Learn more about how the project can help you unlock the potential of your innovation ecosystem.

Innovation Capabilities Outlook

The Innovation Capabilities Outlook captures the dynamic shifts in how economies build, connect, and leverage their innovation capabilities across science, technology, entrepreneurship, and production.

Why map innovation capabilities?

Recently, there has been a resurgence of industrial policies at a global level. In this new wave, governments are increasingly making critical decisions in the fields of science, technology, and innovation policy, which affect resource allocation decisions by various public and private actors within different innovation ecosystems.

There is growing consensus that decisions should not be made in isolation and through centralized ("top-down") approaches, but rather by considering the local capabilities and needs of innovation ecosystems. Instead of replicating successful industries from other regions, approaches like smart specialization emphasize the need for policies grounded in local diagnostics and knowledge, leveraging each region's existing skills and, above all, addressing its specific challenges

Bottom-up approaches that use data to measure capabilities can inform policies that are aligned with local realities, fostering a more inclusive and effective innovation ecosystem.