While India is witnessing substantial growth in startup activity, Sweden continues to foster creativity. Global Insight assesses what’s needed for countries to take a leading role in shaping the future.

‘Even if innovation investment is in a lull, innovation itself is not,’ says the Director General of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Daren Tang. He’s alluding to WIPO’s 2025 Global Innovation Index, which reveals that research and development growth has declined to its slowest pace since the financial crisis, while venture capital deals around the world remain muted following the ‘severe downturn’ seen in 2023.

Nevertheless, this has done nothing to halt creativity. ‘Green supercomputers are setting new efficiency records,’ Tang writes in his foreword to WIPO’s innovation index. ‘Battery prices and genome sequencing costs continue to fall. Adoption of electric vehicles, 5G and robotics are gaining ground, albeit unevenly across regions. And, while the full impact of artificial intelligence remains uncertain, its transformative potential is undeniable.’ The WIPO Index, covering IP developments in 139 economies, has been running for 18 years. Tang says the 2025 edition reveals a particularly strong showing from middle-income economies such as China, Turkey and Vietnam, with India being a standout performer. He highlights that ‘innovation momentum is diversifying across regions’.

India’s momentum

A decade ago, India ranked 81st on the Index, but the country has rapidly climbed the chart in the intervening period. By 2020 it had risen to 48th place overall and in 2025 it came in at number 38, while also taking the number one slot in both the Central and Southern Asia and lower middle-income economy categories. India’s innovation landscape is increasingly shaped by regional clusters that combine universities, research institutions, venture capital organisations and tech companies, with those based in the cities of Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai noted for their particular strength.

The country has, according to WIPO, been able to leverage large talent pools and startup momentum to become ‘a model for middle-income economies aiming to overperform on innovation’. For Deepa Tiku, Asia Pacific Regional Forum Liaison Officer for the IBA Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law Committee, the country’s success is a direct result of the various policies put in place by its government over a number of years.

‘It’s a mix of a lot of things,’ says Tiku, who’s a partner at Indian firm K&S Partners. ‘In 2016 we had the National Intellectual Property Rights Policy, which was instituted by the government and was one of the [measures] that pivoted India towards growth in innovation ecosystems. It created a coordinated government approach to IP, which was not very well done before, and that’s percolated through the system. With that in place, IP has been an economic tool as well as an innovation tool.’

Other policy changes highlighted by Tiku include Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India initiative, which launched in 2014 and offers a range of subsidies and incentives to support domestic manufacturing, and the Startup India programme, which has simplified the regulatory landscape and helped forge partnerships between academia and industry. In 2025, India was home to 64 ‘unicorns’ – startups valued at more than $1bn – according to the Hurun Research Institute, with companies such as online trading platform Zerodha, fantasy sports business Dream11 and payments company Razorpay on the list. Though India is still a considerable way behind China and the US when it comes to creating unicorn companies, it boasts the third largest number of them globally, according to the Centre’s research.

‘The government’s policies have kept innovation at the centre of growth and competitiveness,’ Tiku says. ‘The companies that are taking advantage of those initiatives are the ones that are driving innovation and economic growth. It has moved IP from the margins to the mainstream and that has led to massive growth in start-up activity while people are more aware of IP so are filing patents then looking to scale up and attract investment. Foreign filings used to dominate the Indian IP Office, but domestic filings have gone up – there’s been a double-digit growth in patents and trademarks from Indian companies.’

Sajai Singh, LPD Council Liaison Officer of the IBA Technology Law Committee, agrees that India has increasingly become an ‘innovation nation’ thanks to government interventions. ‘Technologies being developed in India have the potential to significantly change the world of tomorrow, offering scalable, cost-effective and inclusive solutions to global challenges in sectors such as AI, digital finance, climate tech and space exploration,’ he says.

Singh – who’s also a partner at law firm JSA in Bengaluru – says India has established itself as a regional leader by embracing the concept of frugal innovation, which focuses on lowering the cost of producing goods and services to meet essential needs. This benefits other developing nations because it enables them to access solutions that might otherwise have been unaffordable while also setting a template for them to follow.

‘Since India’s approach emphasises frugal innovation, its models are very relevant to other developing nations in the Global South,’ says Singh. He highlights the area of digital public infrastructure, where India's Unified Payments Interface is a globally recognised success model for real-time digital payments – one that’s an inspiration for many countries.

A number of countries in Africa and Asia are also following India’s lead in AI-powered tools used for remote diagnostics, chronic disease monitoring and thermal breast cancer screening, Singh adds. ‘And, in the agritech sector, low-cost, AI-powered solutions like soil sensors and AI-driven crop advisory applications have been adopted by farmers globally to improve yields and use water and fertiliser more efficiently,’ he explains.

Frugality has drawbacks too, Singh says – for example, the relatively low levels of investment being made into R&D in India mean there’s ‘still room for improvement’. India, he notes, spends little on R&D at a state level – just 0.65 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) – and there are ‘glaring gaps in infrastructure, including digital connectivity and energy efficiency,’ says Singh. ‘There is also a long road [ahead] to improving industry-academia collaboration and the commercialisation of research.’

The perfect mix

Given the substantial levels of investment required to take new ideas through the R&D stage and beyond, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the most innovative nations in the world are also among the wealthiest. Switzerland takes the top spot in the WIPO Index overall, followed by Sweden in second place and the US in third. The UK makes it into the top ten at number six, while China, which ranks in tenth place, is the only developing economy to feature at the top of the leaderboard.

Lukas Bühlmann, a Member of the IBA Technology Law Committee Advisory Board, says that Switzerland – which has now topped the WIPO index for 15 consecutive years – benefits from being a wealthy jurisdiction, one that has a largely skilled workforce thanks to the level of investment it has made in its universities, which in turn have strong links with industry. The country is also situated within Europe but isn’t part of the EU, which has implications for how it approaches regulation. This in turn appeals to innovators and entrepreneurs across the region.

Bühlmann, a partner at MLL Legal in Zürich, says that Switzerland can walk a different path to the EU in terms of how it regulates upcoming technologies. ‘If we take AI as an example, there are very stringent regulations in the EU but Switzerland is in the middle of the EU geographically while also being an outsider so we don’t have to take the same regulatory approach,’ he says. ‘Swiss companies that are active in the EU have to comply with EU law, but [being outside the bloc] allows us to take a bit more of a pragmatic view of how we transpose those rules into Swiss law.’

‘There’s a motivation to analyse what the EU does and look at it from a more liberal point of view to identify the hardcore principles we really need,’ Bühlmann says. He’s clear that Switzerland isn’t like the US, where it’s not the role of government agencies to regulate and issue fines but rather for civil litigation to manage the market. However, Bühlmann characterises the Swiss approach as ‘cautious regulation’. That’s something, he says, ‘that attracts tech startups with great ideas because it gives them a bit more freedom’. Switzerland also boasts a host of big-name innovators such as Valiant Bank, Rolex and ABC SwissTech.

Sweden, by contrast, is an EU Member State bound by all of the bloc’s regulatory rules. It’s also home to an array of equally high-profile names. Johan Hübner, former Chair of the IBA Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Subcommittee, says that part of the reason Sweden has been a global leader on innovation and the birthplace of companies such as Volvo, IKEA, Klarna and Spotify is that, like Switzerland, it held a position of neutrality during the Second World War.

‘That meant we had a jump start in the 1950s,’ says Hübner, who’s a partner at law firm Delphi in Stockholm. ‘Elementary school and high school has been paid by the tax bill forever, which meant that in the [1960s] we had an increasing number of people finishing high school and getting the education necessary to go to university. There was also a shift in the number of women going to university. Universities, which are also free, were flooded with talented people in the sixties, seventies and eighties.’

In the 1990s, the internet ‘boom’, combined with the already high level of technological advancement in the country, meant that ‘lots of people realised there’s an alternative to being employed, which is to start your own company,’ says Hübner. ‘We also have a welfare system where, if you completely fail, there’s hardly any risk of you ending up on the streets. There’s a security net.’

Hanna Tilus, Head of Swedish firm Cirio’s digitalisation and technology group, says that funding has become harder to come by in the past few years but adds that, in general, Sweden’s startup scene has been bolstered by companies being able to access a mature investment ecosystem. ‘In the last two years finance has been quite slow but, before that, if you had anything like AI in your [company] description then you could get a lot of funding,’ she says. ‘That has come from the government and [from] angel investors. There’s a good ecosystem on the private side but it helps that it’s a mix – if a private investor can see that the government is investing then it’s easier for them to make the decision to jump on the train.’

Hübner adds that the country has benefited from its long history of fostering innovation, with successful people going on to help fund those who have come after them. The angel investor network becomes ‘like an umbrella’ for the whole ecosystem, he says.

Tomorrow’s world

When Global Insight looked at the future of technology back in 2016 in its feature ‘Technology 2030’, contributors predicted the advances that would become commonplace in the near future – with varying degrees of success. For example, while developments such as Apple Pay, which launched in the US in 2014 and in Australia, Canada and the UK a year later, have brought mobile payments into the mainstream, the ‘Internet of Things’ hasn’t become as widespread as some suggested it might. Indeed, while the use of data by retailers has become ever-more sophisticated, it’s not yet routine for fridges to take charge of ordering groceries for their owners.

Chris Holder, a former Co-Chair of the IBA Technology Law Committee and a partner at Browne Jacobson in London, took part in that round of predictions. Looking to the future now, he says that AI has developed to such a degree that, when paired with the power offered by quantum computing, it will usher in the era of fully personalised medicine. ‘Quantum computing has the capacity to increase computing technology exponentially,’ says Holder. ‘It would be like the equivalent of looking at black and white TV footage and then looking at full high-definition colour. Its ability to crunch numbers will be huge – a problem that would take lots of years to do on a normal computer, quantum computing will be able to do in five minutes.’

This will be transformative for medicine, he believes. ‘People will be able to walk into a [pharmacist], say “I’ve got a headache” and the aspirin they get will be designed specifically for them on the spot,’ he explains. ‘We’re at the foothills. When the human genome was being sequenced it took a lot of computing power but it was done. Now it’s genetic mutations that are being looked at and how to develop new drugs. We’re getting there.’

Holder adds that preventative and personalised medicine is now the focus for most countries in terms of healthcare. Looking after people who are ill isn’t where health systems are going, he says, as ‘it’ll be far better to prevent illness and enhance people’s existence’.

Tilus believes AI will continue to develop to the point where it’s incorporated into our daily lives – not necessarily to handle everyday tasks, as was once predicted, but to find specific targeted solutions. She mentions the Swedish company Lovable – which uses AI to enable people with no tech experience to become software developers – as being in the vanguard of this change. The company achieved over $100m in annualised revenue in just eight months in 2025.

‘You can see that there’s a better balance now between what AI companies are offering than there was two or three years ago,’ she says. ‘A lot [of companies] were saying that AI could do this and that but no one knew what it meant. It’s become a bit more concrete and people can make better assessments and see what’s unique. Lovable is interesting because it is used for programming but users can talk to it. You don’t need to know anything about coding or AI, you just talk to it and tell it what you want to achieve.’

Hübner warns that technological advances could become more of a ‘slippery slope’ than a revolution, taking over everyone’s lives in a similar way to smartphones, without anyone being fully aware of what’s going on ‘under their eyes’. However, he believes the investment being poured into alternatives to fossil fuels, such as innovative nuclear power, could transform the world just as quickly as innovations like the iPhone.

‘Many investments in Sweden [currently] are to do with producing and storing energy and if there’s a lot of interest in that right now it will probably pay off in three to seven years’ time,’ he says. ‘New actors will come in and someone will come up with the equivalent of the iPhone that will change that area.’

That said, Hübner highlights that one of the biggest risks to innovation on a global scale is the current political climate, with many jurisdictions taking a tough stance on issues, such as immigration, which could have huge unintended consequences. ‘In the last ten years at least 50 per cent of the startups or scaleups we’ve been working on have been run by either first- or second-generation immigrants, particularly people coming from the Middle East,’ he says.

He highlights that many of these people have graduated from business schools such as the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Stockholm School of Economics and that they’re protected in Swedish society ‘by the fact you can try and fail’. Hübner says that ‘if we’re getting more repressive on immigration it will have huge implications’.

Margaret Taylor is a freelance journalist and can be contacted at magsntaylor@gmail.com

Header image: Adobe Stock/Nuchjaree