The World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, released its Global Innovation Index 2021 on Sept 20 – and its findings showed that China was continuing to climb its Global Innovation Index, or GII.

According to the report, China has made continuous progress – moving from 14th place last year to 12th this year – and is now "knocking at the door of the GII top 10".

The report added that this "underlines the continued importance of governmental policies and incentives to stimulate innovation".

Since 2013, China has reportedly moved up the GII ranks consistently and steadily, being the only middle-income economy in the list and establishing itself as a global innovation leader.

The number of China's patents by origin, scaled by GDP, is higher than that of Japan, Germany and the United States and considered by the report to be even more impressive when considered in absolute terms. The same is true for the number of trademarks and industrial designs by origin as a percentage of GDP.

In terms of innovation clusters geographically, the top 10 list remains the same as last year with only minor shifts. The Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou region and Beijing now rank second and third, respectively, after the Tokyo-Yokohama cluster in Japan. The city of Shanghai ranks eighth and of the top 100 clusters, China has 19.

The report said that from the perspective of innovation output, China's advantages are concentrated in intangible assets, knowledge creation and knowledge influence. Among them, its domestic patent and trademark applications, its share in the total trade of creative products and other sub-indicators are leading the world.

In the current year, significant progress has been identified in the major index in terms of knowledge dissemination, especially in the sub-index for the proportion of intellectual property income in total trade.

The report said this showed that China was gradually transforming from being a major importer of IP to a major IP generator.