Mapped: The World’s Top Innovation Clusters - Visual Capitalist

Innovation clusters – whether they be innovation-driven cities or regions – are the beating heart of national innovation systems. Such hubs unite top universities, researchers, inventors, venture capitalists and research and development (R&D) firms in driving forward breakthrough ideas. From Paris to Mexico City, Shenzhen to Stockholm, Seoul or San Francisco, global cities blend research, startups and R&D firms to power innovation. Each year, the Global Innovation Index (GII) ranks the top 100 innovation clusters worldwide (Map 1). Employing a bottom-up, data-driven methodology that disregards administrative and political borders, the GII pinpoints those geographic areas that have a high density of inventors, scientific authors and/or venture capital (VC) activity. The clusters identified according to these criteria often span several municipal districts or sub-federal states, and sometimes even two or more countries. Three metrics are used to define the top 100 clusters globally (see Appendix IV for details and a comparison to earlier methods). The first focuses on the location of inventors listed in published patent applications under the WIPO Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

Explore how Europe's migrant population changed since 2000, from the UK's 7.1 million increase to Malta's record 827% growth.