Global Innovation Tracker Dashboard
The Global Innovation Index (GII) 2026 Tracker charts innovation through a year in which artificial intelligence (AI) has carried an unusually large share of global economic momentum. The world economy grew about 3.4 percent in 2025. High-tech exports grew roughly 14 percent to a new high, nearly three times faster than global trade, led by the build-out of AI (
It is against this backdrop that the Tracker examines four stages of the innovation cycle: science and innovation investment, technological progress, technology adoption, and the socioeconomic impact of innovation.
Key messages
Innovation has held up. Almost all indicators across the four stages are in positive territory, marking a broad-based improvement from the more mixed picture presented in the GII 2022 and GII 2023 editions.
Innovation investment has strengthened. Corporate R&D among the world’s largest spenders reached a record USD 1.5 trillion in 2025, up close to 8 percent, and rose to 6 percent of revenue, the highest share on record.
The research effort is at a historic high. Global R&D intensity rose from 1.4 percent of GDP in 2000 to close to 2 percent in 2025, and is projected to hold there through 2026.
Other strong gains: record scientific output, venture capital (VC) deal values at the highest since 2021, and a comeback in global labor productivity growth.
Three indicators worsened: VC deal counts kept falling, renewable energy costs rose for the first time since 2014, and global temperatures were the second highest on record.
The recovery is nonetheless incomplete: about three-quarters of indicators remain below their decade averages, and only four grew faster than their 10-year trends, namely, scientific publications, VC deal values, cancer radiotherapy availability, and labor productivity.
Two forces shaped the year, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is concentration at the frontier. A growing share of investment is directed toward AI and a narrower set of firms and locations. VC deal values rose 27.9 percent to USD 510 billion in 2025 while deal counts fell 1.4 percent, and AI now accounts for about half of global VC value. Within corporate R&D, software and AI-intensive firms grew fastest, and unicorn valuations and IPO attention show the same tilt. This mirrors the macroeconomic pattern: optimism around AI fueled large AI-related capital spending, which supported global growth and kept financial conditions accommodative in 2025 (
The second is diversification across the base. Innovation and technology diffusion kept on spreading to middle-income economies beyond China. Egypt, Chile and Ethiopia raised scientific output; Malaysia, Indonesia and Viet Nam sustained long-run growth in R&D; VC and patenting activity grew, from Argentina to Morocco, India to Türkiye; robots and electric vehicles spread across Asia and Latin America; and labor productivity rose fastest across China and a diverse group of economies in Asia and Africa.
The two forces are not in contradiction: the frontier is concentrating, while the base is diversifying.
Science and innovation investment
Scientific output reached a new high, led by China’s expansion. Global R&D kept growing, and corporate R&D among the top spenders reached a record USD 1.5 trillion, tilting further toward software and AI. VC values rose to their highest since 2021 even as deal counts fell for a fourth year, and international patent filings continued a gradual recovery.
Scientific publications
Most investment indicators remained in positive territory in 2025, although momentum varied across areas. Global scientific publications reached a record 2.4 million articles in 2025, up 6.9 percent from 2024, a second consecutive year of strong growth (see Figure 1). Over the decade, output grew at an annualized 5.1 percent, one of only two investment indicators above its own long-run trend.
China recorded a 15 percent increase in scientific publications and accounted for 37 percent of the global total. India expanded scientific publications by 4.4 percent to a 6.6 percent share, whereas the United States output edged down 0.3 percent, though still accounting for 16 percent of the total.
The more telling shift is further down the distribution. A number of other economies, such as Egypt (around 32,500 articles in 2025), Indonesia (16,200), Chile (13,300), Viet Nam (12,600) and Ethiopia (9,700), continued to expand scientific output, suggesting that research capacity is also strengthening beyond the largest scientific producers. How the widening research base translates into firms and products is the focus of this edition’s Special theme on deep science entrepreneurship (see the Special theme chapter).
Research and development (R&D)
Economy-wide R&D expenditure
Global R&D expenditure grew by 4.7 percent in real terms in 2024, up from 4.2 percent in 2023 (see Figure 2).
Global R&D intensity has kept rising over the long term, from 1.4 percent of GDP in 2000 to 1.97 percent in 2024; and is projected at 1.97 percent in 2025 and 1.98 percent in 2026 (see Figure 3). The world economy is thus more research-intensive than ever, and has sustained that effort through an uneven recovery (see also
The regional distribution of R&D has shifted markedly over the past decade and a half, with China’s expanding share as the main driver and with Europe’s share continuing to decline. Northern Africa and Western Asia recorded a rising share on stronger investment in Egypt, Israel and Türkiye; Malaysia, Indonesia and Viet Nam have posted sustained long-run growth; and Sub-Saharan Africa’s share, though still small, has also risen over time.
Top corporate R&D spenders
On the corporate side, 2025 R&D data are available for about 1,550 of the top 2,000 corporate R&D spenders worldwide.
Corporate R&D among the world’s largest investors reached USD 1.5 trillion in 2025, the highest on record (see Table 1). Spending rose close to 8 percent in nominal and 5.8 percent in real terms over 2024, back toward its longer-run trend. R&D intensity climbed to 6 percent, up from 4.3 percent in 2015: the world’s largest firms have never devoted a larger share of revenue to research.
Growth varied widely by sector (see Figure 4). Software and ICT services grew fastest, with 2025 R&D more than five times its 2015 level; ICT hardware and electrical equipment followed at just under three times, while pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, automobiles, chemicals, and manufacturing and heavy industries each roughly doubled. Aerospace and defense rose sharply on renewed defense investment (see Box 1), whereas construction and materials contracted following strong earlier growth.
R&D spending in aerospace and defense has grown rapidly, from about USD 19.5 billion across the tracked top spenders in 2021 to USD 26 billion in 2025, with the largest increases in 2024 and 2025, consistent with the usual lag between higher defense budgets and funded development programs. European firms contributed to much of the rise: Rheinmetall nearly doubled its R&D to USD 471 million, Leonardo raised its spending 23 percent to USD 3.5 billion, and SAAB to 33 percent after Sweden’s NATO accession. The picture for United States firms was more mixed, with Lockheed Martin at a series high, whereas Boeing and RTX stayed modestly below 2024 levels. Accounting differences affect the aggregate: BAE Systems reports negative R&D, because costs are recovered through government contracts, and Rolls-Royce recorded an unusually low 2024 figure.
Does this tilt mean corporate R&D is concentrating in a few large digital firms? At the top end, yes: the 10 largest spenders’ share of total R&D rose from about 20 percent in 2015 to roughly 27 percent in 2025. Within sectors, the opposite is the case: the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), which rises when just a few firms dominate a given sector’s R&D, fell across almost every sector over the decade.
Figure 5 reports 2025 R&D growth for the top 15 firms in each industry: positive on average in ICT software and hardware, negative in energy, chemicals, and construction and materials.
In software and ICT services, Meta grew fastest among the large spenders, at around 32 percent, while Amazon, Tencent and Alphabet each expanded R&D by more than 20 percent; in ICT hardware, demand for AI chips drove R&D growth, with NVIDIA up about 43 percent and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Taiwan Semiconductor, and Broadcom each up between 18 and 25 percent.
Automobiles split between firms investing through the electric and autonomous transition and incumbents cutting back: Stellantis (about 94 percent), Tesla (about 41 percent) and Honda (about 40 percent) grew fastest, while Volkswagen, General Motors, Nissan and BMW cut R&D amid restructuring. Chinese producers such as BYD, now among the top automobile spenders, add to the pressure.
Pharmaceuticals and biotechnology split along similar lines: Amgen and Eli Lilly raised R&D by roughly 21 percent on obesity and metabolic pipelines, whereas Pfizer, Roche, and Merck cut spending ahead of patent expiries. Competition from Chinese biotech is rising: BeiGene increased R&D from USD 49 million in 2015 to over USD 2.1 billion in 2025, and CSPC Pharmaceutical and Sino Biopharmaceutical each reached around USD 830 million, none of which are yet in the top 15 but clearly building capacity beyond the traditional leaders.
Venture capital
Venture capital (VC) in 2025 shows the year’s defining tension in its clearest form: a strong recovery in terms of the money invested alongside a continued decline in the number of firms receiving it. Deal values rose 27.9 percent on 2024 to USD 510 billion, the strongest gain since the 2021 peak, whereas deal counts fell 1.4 percent to about 43,500, a fourth consecutive decline from nearly 59,000 in 2021 (see Figure 6). The recovery is carried by a small number of very large rounds rather than a broad revival in funding (
Over the decade to 2025, deal values grew at an annualized 10.6 percent and deal counts at 3.4 percent, so the recent decline in activity has not erased the longer-term expansion of the market.
AI is the engine of the value rebound and the source of its concentration. Around the time of the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, AI accounted for about 27 percent of global VC value; by 2025 its share had risen to 53 percent, whereas its share of deal counts rose far less, from 24 to 34 percent. The pattern intensified in the first half of 2026: AI accounted for 77 percent of global VC value but only 36 percent of deal counts, with OpenAI (USD 122 billion), Anthropic (USD 95 billion) and xAI (USD 20 billion) recording the largest deals globally, together representing close to 43 percent of total VC value.
This concentration is also geographic. Northern America accounted for about USD 213 billion of the USD 270 billion in AI-related VC in 2025, with Europe (USD 30 billion) and Asia (USD 21 billion) far behind. Northern America’s share of all VC value is approaching 70 percent, whereas Asia’s has fallen from about 30 percent in 2023 to 13 percent, roughly level with Europe (
Beneath these totals, several economies outside the largest markets recorded genuine gains. The United States and China remained the two largest markets, with 15,738 and 7,604 deals, respectively, both up modestly whereas most other large markets declined. Morocco, a lower middle-income economy, has expanded deal counts at a 39.1 percent annualized rate over five years, and Argentina at 14.5 percent; Saudi Arabia rose 47.9 percent to 213 deals and the United Arab Emirates kept positive long-run growth despite a 2025 decline. African startups raised USD 3.2 billion in 2025, up about 40 percent on 2024.
Beyond AI, sizeable rounds in 2025 and early 2026 were spread across energy storage and next-generation power (Base Power, Pacific Fusion), semiconductors (Yangtze Memory, CXMT) and health (Retro Biosciences, Ōura Health) (see Figure 7). Many are capital-intensive, science-based ventures of the kind examined in this edition’s Special theme on deep science entrepreneurship (see the Special theme chapter). The open question for 2026 is whether rising deal values, still below the 2021 peak of USD 754 billion, broaden into a wider recovery or remain driven by a few large AI deals in a few locations.
In 2025, 125 new unicorns emerged globally, up from 87 in 2024 and the highest since 2022, though far below the 463 of 2021 and broadly in line with pre-pandemic levels. As with VC, capital pooled in fewer, higher-value firms.
Concentration at the top end is pronounced. WIPO’s analysis puts the total valuation of the global unicorn landscape at about USD 6.1 trillion in April 2026, up from USD 3.8 trillion in 2022, with the United States, China and India holding more than 80 percent of that value (
Measured against the size of the economy, the leaders look different, and smaller and emerging economies stand out. On the GII indicator of unicorn valuation as a percentage of GDP, Estonia (about 19 percent, led by Bolt) and Singapore (18 percent) top the ranking, ahead of the United States (13 percent). India’s broad-based unicorn set is worth about 4 percent of its GDP, and in Senegal the single unicorn, Wave, equals around 4.5 percent (
The 2025 cohort reflected both dynamic trends (see Box Table 2.1 for selected examples). New US entrants included AI-focused firms such as Thinking Machines Lab and Labs, while China added industrial and clean-tech unicorns such as Zhiyuan Robot and Fox ESS. New unicorns also emerged in a wider range of economies, including Australia, Germany, India, Mexico, the Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, pointing to a broadening geographic footprint. Emerging markets across Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East became increasingly prominent, particularly in fintech, e-commerce, digital services and frontier technologies.
Early 2026 continued these themes (see Box Table 2.1 for selected examples). AI and deep-tech firms remained prominent, including ArtIn Energy, MatX and Etched in the United States, NEURA Robotics in Germany and Paxini in China. At the same time, fintech unicorns such as Ualá in Argentina and Juspay in India, pointed to continued geographic diversification beyond the largest innovation hubs.
International patent filings
International patent filings continued a gradual recovery in 2025. Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications reached 275,900, up 0.7 percent. This represents a second consecutive year of growth after the 2023 contraction, but is still well below the long-run annualized rate of 2.4 percent, which has itself trended down, pointing to a structural softening amid uncertainty and shifting R&D priorities (
China remained the biggest filer, with 73,718 applications, up 5.4 percent and consistent with its 9.5 percent long-run rate. The United States followed with 52,617, a third consecutive year of decline, whereas the Republic of Korea expanded to 25,016 and Singapore maintained strong growth. European activity was mixed, with a 44 percent rise in Finland. India’s filings fell 32 percent after a run of exceptional years, a normalization given its 8.1 percent long-run rate; the United Arab Emirates rose 31.7 percent, the largest percentage increase among mid-sized filers; and the Islamic Republic of Iran posted the highest long-run rate at 19.7 percent.
The composition of filings tells the same AI story: digital communication and semiconductor technologies were among the fastest-growing fields, reflecting continued activity in connectivity, computing and AI-enabling hardware (
Technological progress
Technological progress in 2025 came mainly through refinement and diffusion rather than breakthrough jumps. Supercomputing efficiency improved even as total energy demand rose; transistor growth slowed, with chipmakers leaning on architecture and packaging; battery prices fell to a record low, while renewable energy costs rose slightly for the first time in a decade; and drug approvals rebounded again, led by oncology. The technologies behind the past decade’s steep cost declines are maturing, and further gains are getting harder to achieve.
Computing power
Green supercomputers
Supercomputing capacity expanded further in 2025 as the exascale era consolidated.
Average energy efficiency of the top 50 systems in the Green500 list reached about 59 Gflops per watt in 2025, up around 10 percent on 2024.
Total energy demand has kept rising. The combined power requirement of the top 100 supercomputers more than doubled between 2015 and 2025, with their estimated annual electricity use nearly tripling to the equivalent of roughly 60,000 people at world-average consumption, up from 26,000 in 2015 though below the 67,000 of 2024. This means efficiency gains have begun to offset part of the demand growth (see Figure 8). The long-run pattern is consistent with the Jevons Paradox: performance per watt has improved, but total consumption has risen regardless (
Moore’s Law
The most advanced commercial microprocessors in 2025, including NVIDIA’s RTX Pro 6000 and AMD’s Threadripper Pro 9995WX, carried roughly 92 to 100 billion transistors, a modest 5.3 percent increase over the 2023 frontier and a sharp slowdown from the 2020–2023 period, when annual increases exceeded 60 percent. With transistor scaling harder to achieve, chipmakers are turning to three-dimensional stacking, chiplet architectures and advanced packaging to keep raising performance.
Costs of renewable energy
The decade-long decline in renewable energy costs paused in 2024. Average generation costs rose 0.6 percent for solar photovoltaic and 2.7 percent for wind over 2023, the first increase since 2014.
Figure 9 charts the following pattern: hydropower, the most established, has remained broadly stable costs; onshore wind has continued gradual reductions; and solar photovoltaic has recorded the decade’s largest decline, from a lower base.
Electric battery price
Lithium-ion battery pack prices fell to a record low of USD 108 per kWh in 2025 (real 2025 USD), down 8.5 percent from 2024 despite higher battery-metal prices, supported by manufacturing scale and lower-cost chemistries. Prices have dropped 87 percent from USD 827 per kWh in 2013, an average annual decline of 15.6 percent, with only a brief supply chain-driven uptick in 2022. Regional differences remain large: China recorded the lowest average pack prices at USD 84 per kWh, with Northern America and Europe 44 and 56 percent higher, respectively.
Cost of genome sequencing
Between 2023 and 2025, the cost of sequencing a human genome fell at an annualized 12.1 percent, from USD 577 to about USD 446, broadly in line with the 13.0 percent decade rate and down from about USD 100 million in 2001, far outpacing Moore’s Law. Some providers report USD 200 to USD 80 per genome, and China has become an important source of price pressure, with platforms led by MGI Tech reporting costs as low as USD 100 at industrial scale.
The pace of reduction has nonetheless slowed as the technology has matured. Innovation is shifting toward efficiency elsewhere in the process, including software, data processing and lab automation, and tighter research budgets in many countries may have eased price competition.
Drug approvals
New drug launches stabilized in 2025: 79 novel active substances (NASs) were launched globally, up 4 percent on 2024 and steadying after a fall from the 2021 record of 93. Launches have increased at an annualized 6.5 percent since 2015, with first-in-class molecules accounting for 38 percent of the total, in line with recent years. Oncology again led, with 29 launches and the most first-in-class medicines (see Figure 10), followed by immunology, endocrinology and infectious diseases, with launches concentrated in just a few areas, but meeting a wide range of clinical needs.
Technology adoption
Technology adoption kept broadening in 2025, though generally below long-run averages, and the fastest growth was in emerging markets. Electric vehicles, digital connectivity and high-speed rail expanded, robot deployment reached a new high, and radiotherapy availability improved slightly faster than trend. Access to safe sanitation, by contrast, stayed uneven, stagnating or declining in several economies.
Safe sanitation
With no new data for this edition, the focus shifts from aggregate progress – highlighted last year in respect of China and India – to the durability and distribution of gains. Coverage remains highly uneven: the global average is 58 percent, yet a number of economies still record rates below 20 percent. This gap matters because poor sanitation is closely linked to preventable disease, lower educational attainment and weaker labor productivity.
Progress is not always self-sustaining. Several economies have recorded a decline in coverage over the past decade, suggesting that gains depend on continued maintenance and institutional capacity as much as they do on initial investment.
Connectivity
Global fixed broadband reached about 20 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants in 2025, representing about 1.65 billion subscriptions and up 5 percent on the year. Access remains far more uneven than it does for mobile connectivity, ranging from under 1 subscription per 100 inhabitants in low-income economies to 39 in high-income ones.
Mobile broadband is expanding much faster (see Figure 11): 5G networks covered 55.1 percent of the world’s population in 2025, representing about 4.5 billion people and up from 53.1 percent in 2024, though growth has slowed since the 2021–2022 rollout. Disparities remain wide, ranging from 84 percent coverage in high-income economies, 66 percent in upper middle-income, 46 percent in lower middle-income down to 4 percent in low-income economies, where around 15 percent of people still either lack mobile coverage or depend on 2G.
Robots
The global stock of industrial robots reached nearly 4.7 million units in 2024, up about 9 percent from 2023. The top five economies – China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the United States and Germany – accounted for roughly 75 percent of the installed base; China alone holds about 2.03 million units, representing 43 percent of global stock.
From roughly 558,000 units in 1993, the global stock had passed one million in 2008, two million in 2017 and four million by 2023. Long-run annual growth stands at about 12 percent, nearly triple the rate of two decades ago, and is associated with efforts to raise productivity and address labor shortages in economies facing demographic pressures (
Adoption is widening beyond the leaders: India’s stock of around 53,000 units grew 17 percent in 2024, Viet Nam’s by 10 percent and Mexico’s by 6.2 percent, while several Central and Eastern European economies, including Bulgaria, Lithuania and Serbia, have recorded long-run growth well above the global average.
Measured relative to economy size, leadership shifts. The Republic of Korea leads at roughly 209 robots per billion USD of GDP, followed by Japan and China, with Slovenia, Slovakia and Czech Ralso recording high adoption intensity.
Electric cars
The global electric vehicle stock reached 75 million in 2025, up 34 percent on 2024, with around 21 million electric cars sold, which is about a quarter of all new car sales. Sales are expected to reach around 23 million in 2026, close to three-tenths of the total. As of 2025, five out of every 100 cars worldwide are electric, up from 4.2 a year earlier, led by Norway at 36 per 100, Iceland (25), Denmark (23) and Sweden (16).
China remained the largest market, with a stock of about 44 million vehicles, though growth moderated to 33 percent as penetration rises and the market matures.
A number of emerging markets grew rapidly between 2024 and 2025 from low bases: electric vehicle stocks rose 629 percent in the Philippines, 155 percent in Viet Nam, 121 percent in Türkiye, 86 percent in Malaysia and 82 percent in Brazil, while Thailand and Indonesia continued to attract investment into vehicle and battery production as automakers expanded abroad (
High-speed rail network
By the end of 2024, the global high-speed rail network comprised 67,723 km of rail lines, up about 4 percent from 2023, representing a further moderation and below the decade average (see Figure 13). Over a five-year horizon more aligned with construction cycles, the network expanded by about 25 percent. China remained the largest system, adding around 2,500 km of line to reach 47,803 km.
Committed capacity is far greater than the operating network: including lines under construction, both planned and in long-term planning, it approaches 130,000 km globally. Asia-Pacific accounted for 52,090 km in operation and 7,539 km under construction; and the Middle East, with 1,681 km in operation and 3,567 km being built, is planning a large-scale expansion relative to its network. Africa already operates high-speed services in Morocco, and development has continued in Northern America and Oceania, including California’s line and the Toronto–Québec City corridor.
Cancer radiotherapy
The Tracker monitors the availability of linear accelerators (LINACs), which deliver high-energy x-rays or electrons for therapeutic or palliative cancer care.
In 2025, LINAC availability per capita rose about 2.0 percent from 2024, which is above the 1.4 percent decade average, and the global stock passed 15,700 units, up 42 percent since 2012. Cancer incidence rose faster, meaning LINACs per million cancer cases fell from about 787 in 2012 to around 729 in 2024, a recovery from roughly 693 in 2022. Recent deployment has eased capacity pressures without fully offsetting rising demand.
Access remains starkly uneven. In 2025, 28 of 100 countries met the minimum radiotherapy requirements set by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA): 27 percent of upper middle-income economies, 7 percent of lower middle-income and none of the low-income economies. The global average rose from 1.55 LINACs per million inhabitants in 2012 to about 1.91 in 2025, but expanding access depends on workforce, infrastructure and health-system capacity as much as it does on equipment.
Socioeconomic impact
Socioeconomic indicators extended their progress in 2025, but unevenly. Labor productivity grew above its long-run average, with the strongest gains to be seen across a diverse group of economies within Asia and Africa, and extreme poverty continued its long decline. Life expectancy stabilized after the post-pandemic rebound. Climate indicators were the exception: temperatures were the second highest on record and emissions edged up further, though more slowly than GDP.
Labor productivity
Global labor productivity kept recovering in 2025, with output per hour up 2.7 percent from 2024, which is above the decade average of 2.2 percent. Workers worldwide now generate close to USD 57,000 in output (PPP, constant 2025 prices), around USD 8,000 more than a decade ago. The pickup is broad: median labor productivity growth across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies, measured according to per person employed, rose from 0.3 percent in early 2024 to 1.2 percent by late 2025, close to its 2010–2019 pace (
Whether this marks a lasting turn is not yet clear. Productivity growth in most advanced economies has slowed since the global financial crisis, and the recent improvement looks largely cyclical, partly reflecting automation adopted during the pandemic (
The global figure masks wide variation (see Table 2 and Figure 14). China recorded the fastest long-run growth, at an annualized 6.4 percent over the decade, followed by Viet Nam (5.3 percent) and Tajikistan (5.2 percent), with Uzbekistan, Ethiopia and Georgia near 4.6 percent, Bangladesh at 4.3 percent, and Armenia and Rwanda around 3.8 percent. That the strongest sustained gains sit with such a diverse group, particularly in Asia and Africa, reflects catch-up rather than a frontier revival, and is among the clearest signs in the Tracker that innovation-driven development is becoming more broad-based.
Poverty
The share of the global population living below USD 3 per day fell to 10.2 percent in 2025, representing about 837 million people, down from 847 million in 2024. In 1981, 47 percent of the world’s population, around 2.1 billion people, lived below that threshold; the subsequent decline in the number of people living below the international poverty line has come about despite a near doubling of the global population.
The reduction was fastest in the 2000s and early 2010s, driven mainly by rapid income growth in China and other large emerging economies, before slowing through the late 2010s. The pandemic pushed the share up temporarily in 2020, but it had fallen back below pre-pandemic levels by 2023. The annual pace of reduction has since moderated to below 0.3 percentage points, yet the number of people in extreme poverty keeps falling.
Life expectancy
Global average life expectancy at birth continued to recover in 2024, reaching about 73.5 years, though this slowed to 0.2 percent as the post-pandemic rebound faded and gains returned to the pre-pandemic trend. The longer-term arc remains striking: a person born in 2024 can expect to live more than 20 years longer than one born in 1960 (76 years for females and 71 for males, against 51 overall in 1960).
Healthy life expectancy – an indicator updated only every five years – adds a caveat (see Figure 15). This indicator has continued to rise, but the gap with overall life expectancy has largely stagnated, indicating limited progress in the share of life spent in good health. The differences are wide: in 2021, 60-year-olds in Japan and Singapore could expect around 20 additional healthy years, against 15.7 years in the United States and fewer than nine in some low-income economies.
Global warming
Global mean surface temperature in 2025 stood at 1.19°C above the 1951–1980 baseline, the second warmest year on record after 2024 (1.29°C). Every month of 2025 ranked among the five warmest for that month, and the past decade averaged about 1.0°C above baseline, consistent with sustained warming rather than isolated anomalies. Notably, the July–September period has reached unprecedented levels in recent years: July and August set record monthly anomalies in 2024 (1.20°C and 1.30°C above the baseline, respectively), while September reached a record 1.48°C in 2023. Early 2026 remained exceptionally warm, with the anomaly reaching 1.32°C above the baseline in March before easing modestly in April and May. Increases remained concentrated in higher-latitude and inland zones: Central Asia led at 3.1°C, with Eastern Europe, Northern America and Northern Europe all above 2°C, while Melanesia, Polynesia and Southern Africa stayed below 1°C. In 2025, 111 of 240 countries and territories exceeded 1.5°C, down from 172 in 2024, partly because several populous tropical nations, including India, Indonesia and Brazil, fell well below the threshold.
Global CO2 emissions reached 38.1 billion tonnes in 2025, up 0.4 percent, but below the 1.1 percent rise of 2024 and well below global GDP growth of about 3.1 percent, consistent with a continued decoupling of emissions from economic activity (
Conclusion and outlook
The GII 2026 Innovation Tracker points to continued but slower progress across the innovation cycle. Most indicators advanced, with notable gains in scientific output, corporate R&D, battery costs and technology adoption, yet about three-quarters remain below the decade average. Research effort has nonetheless remained at a historic high, with global R&D intensity close to 2 percent of GDP.
As set out at the start of this chapter, two forces ran through the year: a frontier concentrating around AI and a few firms and locations, above all in the United States; and a base diversifying toward a wider group of middle-income economies in research, patenting and technology adoption. Significant gaps remain in access to infrastructure, health technologies and basic services. As in previous editions, the Tracker offers a selective view, aiming at a broad and timely picture of how investment, progress, adoption and impact are evolving across economies.
The near-term environment is more demanding than it was a year ago. Global growth of about 3.4 percent in 2025 is expected to ease to around 3 percent in 2026, held back by higher energy prices and elevated uncertainty, before recovering modestly in 2027. AI-related investment remains the main engine on the upside: the largest hyper-scalers are set to spend well over USD 1 trillion on AI infrastructure across 2025 and 2026, increasingly financed through debt and private credit, meaning a downward revision of expected AI returns could tighten financing conditions well beyond the sector.
For innovation, the open question remains the one posed in the GII 2022 Special theme: that is, whether new innovation waves can revive sluggish productivity growth. AI is now the leading candidate in this respect, but its contribution to aggregate productivity is not yet visible, and its lasting effect is likely to come from a second wave of investment in data, skills and reorganized processes rather than from the physical build-out itself. The channels of diffusion are forming: technology trade is lifting output across Asia, low-cost open-weight AI models are spreading in low- and middle-income economies, and this edition documents growing research systems, venture activity and technology adoption from Morocco to Viet Nam. Whether it is the concentrating frontier or the diversifying base that comes to dominate the innovation landscape will shape both growth and the geography of innovation.
Data notes
Scientific publications captures the number of peer reviewed articles published across 182 fields of science and technology, derived from journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). Source: Web of Science (Clarivate), https://apps.webofknowledge.com.
R&D investment captures R&D expenditure worldwide in PPP-adjusted constant 2020 prices. Values for 2024 use available real data on gross expenditure on R&D (GERD) and business enterprise expenditure on R&D (BERD) from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), the OECD Main Science and Technology Indicators (March 2026 update), Eurostat and RICYT. Missing 2024 values were estimated by carrying forward the last observed R&D intensity and applying it to GDP PPP. Values for 2025 and 2026 were estimated for all economies using projected R&D intensity and IMF World Economic Outlook GDP growth (April 2026).
Top corporate R&D spenders uses 2015-2024 data from the European Commission 2025 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, and 2025 data from Moody’s Analytics Orbis and company annual reports. Figures are in current US dollars; real growth rates convert local currency R&D into US dollars at end-2025 market exchange rates and deflate using country-level GDP deflators.
Venture capital (VC) refers to the number of VC deals worldwide and the total amount invested via VC, in current US dollars. Source: PitchBook Data, Inc, https://www.pitchbook.com.
International patent filings refers to the total number of applications filed through the WIPO-administered Patent Cooperation Treaty. Source: WIPO IP Statistics Data Center, https://www.wipo.int/ipstats.
Green supercomputers captures the average efficiency (Gflops per watt) of the top 50 systems in the Green500 list. Source: TOP500, https://www.top500.org/lists/.
Microchip transistor count (Moore’s Law) refers to the number of transistors on the most advanced commercially available microchips in a given year. Source: Karl Rupp, https://github.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-trend-data.
Cost of renewable energy captures the global weighted average levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of solar photovoltaics and onshore and offshore wind, weighted by installed capacity. Source: International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), https://www.irena.org/Publications/2025/Jun/Renewable-Power-Generation-Costs-in-2024.
Electric battery price refers to the average price of lithium-ion batteries (cell, module and pack) in real 2025 USD per kWh, weighted by power capacity across sectors. Source: BloombergNEF, https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-fall-to-108-per-kilowatt-hour-despite-rising-metal-prices-bloombergnef.
Cost of genome sequencing refers to the cost of sequencing one human genome (USD). Source: National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), US National Institutes of Health, https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcostsdata.
Drug approvals refers to the number of novel active substances (NASs) launched anywhere in the world by year of first global launch. Source: IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, Global Trends in R&D 2026, https://www.iqvia.com/insights/the-iqvia-institute/reports-and-publications/reports/global-r-and-d-trends-2026.
Safe sanitation refers to the share of population using an improved sanitation facility not shared with other households, with excreta safely disposed in situ or treated off-site. Source: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), https://washdata.org.
Fixed broadband refers to fixed subscriptions for high-speed internet access at downstream speeds of at least 256 kbit/s, per 100 inhabitants. Source: International Telecommunication Union (ITU), https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/facts.
5G coverage refers to the share of the population covered by at least a 5G mobile network. Source: International Telecommunication Union (ITU), https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/facts.
Robot adoption measures the operational stock of industrial robots, assuming an average service life of 12 years. Source: International Federation of Robotics (IFR), https://ifr.org/worldrobotics.
Electric cars stock is the number of passenger cars that are battery electric or plug-in hybrid; EV share is the percentage of the passenger car stock that is electric. Source: International Energy Agency (IEA), https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/global-ev-data-explorer.
High-speed rail network refers to the total length of high-speed rail lines in commercial operation, classified primarily by a commercial operating speed of 250 km/h or greater. Source: International Union of Railways (UIC), https://uic.org/passenger/highspeed/article/high-speed-data-and-atlas.
Cancer radiotherapy refers to the number of linear accelerators (LINACs) per inhabitant, with the penetration rate measuring how many economies meet minimal radiotherapy resource requirements. Source: IAEA DIRAC and IARC GLOBOCAN, special tabulations for the GII based on IAEA DIRAC (https://dirac.iaea.org) and IARC GLOBOCAN (https://gco.iarc.fr) databases.
Labor productivity (rates) refers to the increase in global output per hour worked in 2025 real USD (PPP), weighted by nominal GDP shares; (levels) is global output per employee in the same units. Source: The Conference Board Total Economy Database (May 2026), https://conference-board.org/data/economydatabase.
Poverty refers to the share of people living below the international poverty line of USD 3 per day (2021 PPP). Estimates after 2024 are nowcasts. Source: World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform, https://pip.worldbank.org.
Life expectancy refers to the remaining years of life expected for a hypothetical cohort alive at age 0 today, subject to the mortality rates of a given year. Source: World Development Indicators (WDI), https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators.
Air temperature anomaly refers to the global mean temperature anomaly relative to the 1951–1980 base period, based on land and ocean data. Source: NASA GISS, https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp.
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