A cluster of cities comprising Hong Kong and two others from mainland China has been named the world’s top innovation hub, a feat attributed to a new ranking metric that involves venture capital deals, a United Nations body has said.
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For the first time in five years, the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster surpassed Tokyo-Yokohama, Japan, to claim the number one spot in the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s (WIPO) 2025 Global Innovation Index.
The result was announced on Monday at the Science Park, where Carsten Fink, chief economist of WIPO’s department for economics and data analytics, said the new ranking metric played a role alongside a cluster’s existing strengths in patent filings and scientific publications.
He said all three metrics, covering the number of venture capital deals, patent filings and scientific publications, were given equal weight in the ranking, with the data used for venture capital including more than 236,000 venture capital deals across 66,000 locations worldwide.
“We don’t just want to track science and technology activity. We also want to see how clusters turn ideas into entrepreneurship and ultimately new products and services that emerge in the marketplace,” Fink said.
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“We need really detailed data at the city level, and there are only limited data sets available. And we’ve worked here with a data provider that collects information of venture capital deals, monitors information of venture capital deals that are concluded around the world.”
The third position of this year’s index is held by San Jose-San Francisco, followed by Beijing and Seoul. The list continues with Shanghai-Suzhou in sixth, followed by New York City and London, Boston-Cambridge and Los Angeles.