Taipei-Hsinchu was the world’s 25th-largest science and technology (S&T) cluster this year, up from 27th last year, according to the Global Innovation Index 2024 released on Tuesday by the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Each year, WIPO publishes a ranking of the top 100 clusters using patent application and scientific publication data to identify local concentrations of world-leading S&T activities.
Since 2016, the index has employed a bottom-up approach to identifying clusters.
Photo: CNA
The methodology disregards administrative or political borders and instead focuses on geographical areas that boast a high density of inventors and scientific authors, WIPO said.
As one of the three science parks in Taiwan, the Hsinchu Science Park (新竹科學園區) is home to many tech giants, including contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), which has been the country’s largest patent applicant for years.
Tokyo-Yokohama in Japan retained the title as the world’s top-performing tech hub, followed by China’s Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou, whose ranking remained unchanged.
WIPO said the top two clusters benefited from a large number of patents filed by Mitsubishi Electric Corp in Tokyo and Huawei Technologies Co (華為) in Shenzhen, China.
Beijing came in third, followed by Seoul, Shanghai-Suzhou in China, San Jose-San Francisco in the US, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto in Japan, Boston-Cambridge in the US, Nanjing, China, and San Diego, California.
The country with the most S&T clusters was China, which held 26 of the top 100 spots.
The US was second with 20.
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