Israel is the second most innovative nation on the world, ranked just after the US and ahead of South Korea, the UK’s Daily Mail showed in a special project.
Israel has ranked ahead of six European countries which were in the top 10, with the United Kingdom sitting in 15th position, between Norway and Singapore. Chile came in last. No Arab countries made the list.
The US is the overall winner with a score of 75.07 out of 100, and Israel followed with a 61.33.
The list was compiled by engineering firm RS Components.
The survey notes that while there is no single measure that captures global scientific progress, but by evaluating Research and Development spending and patents, and looking at the number of researchers and academic papers a country has, one can see the leading indicators of a nation’s commitment to be at the forefront of scientific discovery.
Every 17 employees out of 1,000 in Israel are researchers, the Jewish state has registered 3,804 patents, has published 1,133 scientific papers, and spends 4.25 percent of its GDP on R&D.
Israel is the world leader when it comes to spending on research and development and the number of researchers in its population.
Israel has previously received high scores in global innovation rankings.
The United Nations’ Global Innovation Index (GII) published in July 2018 showed that Israel ranked 11th globally, and the first in the Northern Africa and Western Asia region, for the sixth consecutive year.
The GII ranks 127 economies based on 80 indicators, ranging from intellectual property filing rates to mobile-application creation, education spending and scientific and technical publications.
Israel leads in the number of researchers, research and development (R&D) expenditures, venture capital deals, R&D funded by business enterprises, research talent in business enterprise, exports of information and communications technology services and Wikipedia edits, the survey found.