Recently, the World Intellectual Property Organization released the "2025 Global Innovation Index Report", which evaluates the innovation performance of nearly 140 economies worldwide using nearly 80 indicators, including research and development expenditures, venture capital transactions, high-tech exports, and intellectual property applications. The report shows that Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, South Korea, and Singapore rank among the top in the innovation index, and China has entered the top ten for the first time, indicating a continuous increase in innovation strength. But the report found that the slowdown in innovation investment growth has cast a shadow over the prospects of innovation. The report shows that global R&D growth will drop to 2.9% in 2024, lower than the 4.4% growth rate in 2023. The World Intellectual Property Organization predicts that global R&D growth will further slow down to 2.3% by 2025. Meanwhile, the report points out that due to high inflation, the actual growth rate of corporate R&D expenditure has slowed down to 1%, far below the average level of 4.6% in the past 10 years. The increase or decrease in R&D investment varies among different industries. Among them, information and communication technology related enterprises, especially AI intensive enterprises, as well as software and pharmaceutical enterprises, have increased their R&D budgets, while manufacturing enterprises such as automobiles and consumer goods have reduced their R&D expenditures against the backdrop of declining revenue. From a capital perspective, the number of global venture capital transactions has declined for the third consecutive year, with a decrease of 4.4%, indicating that investors remain cautious except for a few industries and regions. The report shows that China ranks tenth in the 2025 Global Innovation Index, entering the top ten for the first time. From the nearly 80 indicators used in the report, China has performed outstandingly in multiple individual indicators, providing strong support for the overall ranking improvement. Among them, in 2024, China will rank first in the world in terms of knowledge and technology output indicators, surpass the United States in R&D expenditure, become the country with the highest R&D expenditure in the world, continue to rank first in the number of patent applications, and rank first in industrial design, trademark, creative product export and other single items globally. In addition to individual indicators, China also has the largest number of innovation clusters in the world. Among the top 100 innovation clusters in the world, a total of 24 are distributed in China. The Shenzhen Hong Kong Guangzhou cluster, under the new evaluation method, has surpassed Tokyo Yokohama to become the world's top ranked innovation cluster. In addition, in the later stages of venture capital and corporate financing research and development, China ranks second in the world; Ranked third among global corporate R&D investors, this highlights the rapidly increasing role of China's private sector in innovation. The report points out that a group of middle-income economies have continued to rise in rankings since 2013, becoming new forces in the global innovation system through education investment, digital infrastructure construction, and industrial upgrading. Among them, India ranks 38th and has been leading the low-income group for a long time, with outstanding performance in multiple indicators of knowledge output and digital services; Türkiye ranked 43rd, making continuous progress in high-tech manufacturing and knowledge output; Vietnam and the Philippines rank 44th and 50th respectively, showing impressive performance in high-tech exports and creative products. The rankings of these developing countries have maintained rapid growth in recent years. Some economies have also shown significant progress since 2019, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Brazil, etc. These countries have generally achieved remarkable results by improving innovation infrastructure, strengthening research and development investment, and promoting government enterprise university cooperation. The report points out that the rise of these countries is driving the global innovation landscape to gradually shift towards multipolarity and regionalization. (New Society)