The 2019 Global Innovation Index (GII) was recently released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Conceived of as a broad measure of the innovative environment in various countries, the GII incorporates a wide variety of indicators in an attempt to measure innovation, ranging from scientific articles normalized by economic output, to the number of full-time equivalent researchers per capita, to ease of access to the Internet. (And yes, it also includes the number of patents.) It also includes some indicators that I’m less certain are meaningful, such as Wikipedia edits or country code top-level domains (CCTLDs) per capita.1 While innovation-ranking systems are hard to design—in part, because innovation is hard to measure—the GII at least attempts to use a variety of well-defined indicators. (Other such systems, not so much.)
- The CCTLD metric, aside from its questionable relationship to innovation, is also likely one in which the U.S. is uniquely penalized due to the .com TLD effectively serving as a U.S. TLD and the .edu and .gov TLDs explicitly being limited to U.S.-based institutions. Although .us has become more common in recent years, for a long time the .com TLD was so popular that a .us domain was seen as unusual for a U.S.-based entity. ↵