Since 2007 economists from Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have issued the annual Global Innovation Index (GII), a report that sizes up the innovative capacities and results of the world's economies. This year's report includes data on 142 economies, which represents 94.9 percent of the world's population and 98.7 percent of global GDP. How does one measure something as abstract as “innovation”? The GII researchers use 84 data points ranging from political stability to ease of starting a business to the number of Wikipedia edits originating there every year.
