6. Innovation, Technology & Digital Indices
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| Report/Index | Publisher | Frequency | What It Measures | India's Approx. Status (with year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global Innovation Index (GII) | WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), a UN specialised agency | Annually | Innovation input (institutions, human capital, infrastructure, market/business sophistication) and output (knowledge, creative outputs), across ~130+ economies | India ranked 38th (GII 2025), up from 39th the previous year — India has climbed roughly 40 places over the past decade, one of the steepest sustained improvements of any large economy |
| World Intellectual Property Indicators (WIPI) | WIPO | Annually | Raw counts and trends in patent, trademark, and industrial-design filings worldwide, by country office | India moved up to among the top ranks worldwide for patent, trademark, and design filings in the 2024/2025 editions, recording double-digit growth in filings — a hard-data statistical companion to the GII's composite score |
| ICT Development Index (IDI) — revived as the "Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development" index | ITU (International Telecommunication Union), a UN specialised agency | Periodic (the original IDI was discontinued in 2017 as a standalone product, later succeeded by newer ITU digital-development tools) | ICT access, use, and skills across countries | Cited historically; India's fast-growing internet/mobile subscriber base is now more often tracked via ITU's newer digital-connectivity reports than the old IDI |
| Global Cybersecurity Index (GCI) | ITU | Roughly every 2 years | National commitment to cybersecurity across legal, technical, organisational, capacity-building, and cooperation pillars, sorted into "role-modelling" tiers rather than a strict numeric rank | India achieved Tier 1 ("role-modelling") status in GCI 2024, its best-ever showing, reflecting a sharply increased score versus the previous edition |
| Network Readiness Index | Portulans Institute (with academic partners) | Annually | A country's capacity to leverage ICT for growth — technology, people, governance, and impact pillars | India ranked in the lower-middle band among ~130 economies assessed |
| AI Readiness/Global AI Index (various competing versions) | Multiple — e.g., Tortoise Media's Global AI Index, Oxford Insights' Government AI Readiness Index | Annually | National capacity/investment/talent in artificial intelligence | India ranked in the top 15–20 on most versions, driven by talent pool and a fast-growing AI-adoption/policy push |
| Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI) | INSEAD (business school), with the Portulans Institute and other partners | Annually | A country's ability to grow, attract, and retain talent, across "enable," "attract," "grow," and "retain" pillars plus vocational/technical and global-knowledge skills outputs | India's rank has recently slipped to around 103rd of ~134 countries assessed in the 2025 edition — a notable underperformance relative to India's much stronger GII rank, worth flagging as its own EPI-vs-CCPI-style divergence |
Global Innovation Index is the single most-tested item in this category and is worth memorising with its publisher's raison d'être: WIPO exists to administer global intellectual-property treaties and patent-filing systems, so an innovation index (heavily patent- and R&D-weighted) is a natural WIPO product, unlike the Gender Gap Report or Global Competitiveness Report, both WEF products for a very different reason (a forum of governments and business leaders wants benchmarks on economic and social competitiveness, not IP).
GII vs WIPI is a same-publisher trap worth flagging on its own: both come from WIPO, but the GII is a composite, weighted, ranked index (blending dozens of input and output indicators, several of them survey- or perception-informed), while WIPI is simply the raw statistical count of patent/trademark/design filings by country office, with no weighting or composite scoring at all — a good concrete illustration of the "index vs report vs raw statistics" distinction from Section 0.5, and also a reminder (see Section 00, point 2) that same-publisher products can still measure fundamentally different things.
Network Readiness Index and the various "Global AI Index" products round out this section's technology cluster and are worth a quick discriminating note: the Network Readiness Index (Portulans Institute) is the direct intellectual descendant of the World Economic Forum's older "Networked Readiness Index," which the WEF itself published until handing the franchise to the Portulans Institute — so a question naming "networked readiness" from an older source may still be describing a WEF product historically, even though today's version comes from an independent academic institute. The competing "Global AI Index" products (Tortoise Media's version and Oxford Insights' Government AI Readiness Index being the two most cited) are a useful lesson in methodological pluralism — unlike HDI or CPI, where one organisation's number is treated as the definitive global reference, AI-readiness measurement is contested enough, and recent enough as a policy field, that no single "official" index has yet achieved HDI-level consensus status, so exam questions in this space tend to test general direction (India performing well on talent/adoption, more moderately on hard infrastructure and regulatory-maturity sub-scores) rather than a single memorised number.
GII vs Global Competitiveness Report vs ICT Development Index is the classic three-way confusion cluster named in this book's own brief: GII (WIPO, innovation input/output, alive and well, India 38th) is often confused with the now-dead GCR (WEF, twelve broad competitiveness pillars, India's last rank 68th in 2019) simply because both produce a "competitiveness-adjacent" country ranking, and both are in turn sometimes confused with the old ICT Development Index (ITU, narrowly about telecom/internet access and skills, discontinued as a standalone product in 2017). Fix the cluster by publisher first (WIPO / WEF / ITU), then by scope (innovation broadly / competitiveness broadly / ICT narrowly).
Global Talent Competitiveness Index deserves special attention as a divergence index, much like EPI-vs-CCPI in Section 4: India's much stronger, steadily-climbing GII rank (38th) sits awkwardly alongside a considerably weaker and recently-slipping GTCI rank (around 103rd) — the reconciliation is that GII rewards aggregate innovation output (which a large economy with strong elite research and start-up hubs can post even with an average national talent base), while GTCI is heavily weighted toward the breadth of an entire national workforce's skills, vocational training, and higher-education access — where India's enormous population and uneven school-to-skills pipeline pull the country-wide average down.
Practice Recall. Before reading on: which UN specialised agency publishes the Global Innovation Index, and why does that agency's mandate make it the natural publisher?
Answer: WIPO — the World Intellectual Property Organization — because GII is heavily weighted toward patents, R&D and knowledge outputs, which is exactly WIPO's institutional domain.