Venture Capital Metric Reshapes WIPO's World’s Top 100 Innovation Clusters Rankings

Geneva, September 1, 2025
PR/2025/939

The addition of venture capital (VC) deal activity as a new metric in this year's WIPO Global Innovation Index (GII) Cluster study has reshaped the ranking with Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou overtaking Tokyo-Yokohama to claim the top spot and San Jose-San Francisco moving up three places to third position.

London, propelled by its position as the third-best performer in VC deals, climbed from 21st to 8th place. For similar reasons, Indian clusters have made remarkable advancements, with Bengaluru jumping from 56th to 21st position for instance.

Established in 2017, the GII Cluster ranking identifies local concentrations of world-class innovation activity using three key metrics: international patent filings via WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), scientific publications, and in a new addition this year, the number of venture capital deals.

Venture capital investment activity helps capture how scientific and technological knowledge translates into startup creation and, ultimately, new goods and services in the marketplace.

Innovation clusters form the backbone of strong national innovation ecosystems, helping to anchor and strengthen the journey from ideas to market. The inclusion of VC deal activity in this year’s GII cluster methodology is recalibrating our understanding of innovation strength, and these new results highlight which clusters are turning scientific research into economic results.

WIPO Director General Daren Tang

Other Key Findings:

• Beijing (China) ranks fourth, followed by Seoul (Republic of Korea), Shanghai–Suzhou (China) and New York City (US).
• The World's top 100 innovation clusters are spread across 33 economies. Countries with the most clusters are China (24), US (22), Germany (7), India and the United Kingdom (4 each) and Canada, Japan and the Republic of Korea (3 each).
• In addition to China and India, several other middle-income economies host clusters in the top 100. These include Brazil with São Paulo (49th); Egypt with Cairo (83rd), the only World's top 100 innovation cluster in Africa; Iran with Tehran (63rd); Malaysia with Kuala Lumpur (86th) and its cross-border cluster shared with Singapore (16th); Türkiye with Istanbul (58th); and Mexico with Mexico City (79th).
• The top three clusters for scientific publications are Beijing (4% of the global total), Shanghai–Suzhou (2.5%), and Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou (2.4%). The highest shares of PCT filings come from Tokyo–Yokohama (10.3%), Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou (9%) and Seoul (5.4%).
• The top-100 clusters accounted for close to 169,000 VC deals during 2019-2023, with San Jose–San Francisco (6.9%), New York City (4.5%), and London (4.4%) as the leading clusters.
• San Jose–San Francisco (US) and Cambridge (UK) rank as the most innovation-intensive clusters relative to their population size, followed by Boston–Cambridge (US), Ningde (China), and Oxford (UK). Ningde’s rise to fourth place globally is driven by a sharp increase in patent filings from Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), a leading company in energy technologies.
• Patent filings and VC deal activity are more geographically concentrated than scientific publications, with the World's top 100 innovation clusters capturing around 70% of these activities globally versus only 50% of publications. The World's top 10 innovation clusters alone contribute 40% of global PCT applications and 35% of global VC deals, while accounting for only 16% of global scientific publications.

WIPO’s 2025 GII Ranking of World’s Top 100 Innovation Clusters chapter excerpt was launched ahead of the GII unveiling on September 16, 2025.

GII Ranking of World’s Top 15 Innovation Clusters by Size, 2025

Browse detailed briefs on each GII World's Top Innovation Cluster including information on the main scientific and patenting contributors or enterprises.

About WIPO's GII World's Innovation Clusters

The GII Ranking of World’s Top 100 Innovation Clusters represent a cornerstone of the comprehensive Global Innovation Index (GII), offering insights into worldwide innovation trends. The GII Ranking of World's Top 100 Innovation Clusters —identified through rigorous bottom-up analysis—spotlight geographic concentrations where innovation reaches its highest density^[1]. By analyzing patent filings, scientific publications, and venture capital activity, the GII reveals geographical areas where inventors, researchers, and start-ups thrive.

The GII World's Top 100 Innovation Clusters are determined using three key innovation metrics. The first tracks the geographic locations of inventors named in patent applications filed under the WIPO Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) ^[2]. The second examines the affiliations of authors on published scientific research articles. Newly introduced in this edition, the third metric measures the locations of companies receiving venture capital (VC) funding.

Notes

[1] See the cluster methodology for further details.

[2] The WIPO Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) assists applicants in seeking patent protection internationally for inventions, helps patent offices with patent granting decisions, and facilitates public access to a wealth of technical information relating to those inventions. By filing one international patent application under the PCT System, applicants can simultaneously seek protection for an invention in a large number of countries.