A cluster comprising Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou has been ranked the world’s top innovation hub for the second consecutive year by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in its 2026 Global Innovation Index. Tokyo-Yokohama, San José-San Francisco, Seoul, Beijing, and Shanghai, followed in the rankings. The government announced it would also deepen collaboration across the bay area to help build a modern industrial system and support national technological self-reliance. The ranking identifies local concentrations of world-class innovation activity using three key metrics: international patent filings via the organization, scientific publications and venture capital deals.
For the 2026 ranking, the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster filed 2,259 patent applications, published 4,060 scientific articles and had 138 venture capital deals per 1 million inhabitants over the last five years. Huawei Technologies was the top patent applicant in the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster, while Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou was the leading publishing organization, the report showed. Mitsubishi Electric and the University of Tokyo led patent filings and publications in Tokyo-Yokohama, while Google and Stanford University topped those categories in San José-San Francisco. Samsung Electronics stood out as the top patent filer in four economies: Seoul, Bengaluru, Moscow and Warsaw.
China ranked first globally with 25 innovation clusters, followed by the United States with 20. Germany had seven, while the United Kingdom and India each had four. The report also published an Innovation Intensity Ranking, in which San José-Francisco topped the list with a total innovation intensity share of 1.836 per capita. Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou ranked 44th with a score of 0.278, up one spot from 2025, the South China Morning Post reports.
