Moscow moved up 25 positions in the ranking of world innovation clusters

The Russian capital is ahead of such cities as Melbourne, Toronto, Stockholm and Zurich.

Moscow took 32nd place in the ranking of the 100 leading innovation clusters in the world in 2020. The data was published in the Global Innovation Index report. The rating of innovative clusters has been published since 2017, during which time the capital has improved its positions by 25 points. This was announced by Vladimir Yefimov, Deputy Mayor of Moscow for Economic Policy and Property and Land Relations.

“The innovative clusters in the rating include both individual cities and agglomerations. Tokyo - Yokohama, Shenzhen - Hong Kong - Guangzhou, Seoul, Beijing and San Jose - San Francisco were included in the top five ranking of innovation clusters this year. In the ranking, Moscow is adjacent to such cities as Singapore, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, while the Russian capital is ahead of Stockholm, Melbourne, Toronto and Zurich. Over the past three years, Moscow has improved its position in this rating by 25 positions, this became possible thanks to systemic measures to support the development of innovative companies and projects, including subsidies, training, business incubators, partnerships between business and the scientific sector,” said the vice mayor.

The Global Innovation Index is compiled by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in partnership with Cornell University and French business school Insead.

Moscow pays special attention to the development of innovations. In 2018, the Moscow innovation cluster appeared in the capital, which has already united more than 17 thousand organizations.

“The result that the city managed to achieve confirms the timeliness of the chosen strategy for the formation of a full-fledged innovative infrastructure for the creation and implementation of advanced technologies. The Moscow innovation cluster is the core of this ecosystem. Today it unites more than 17 thousand innovative organizations from Moscow and other regions of Russia. Most of these organizations are small and medium-sized enterprises that have access to opportunities to find partners, consumers, sites for production and pilot testing of projects, as well as information on more than 200 federal and city support measures,” said Alexey Fursin, Head of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovative Development.

When compiling the rating, the authors of the Global Innovation Index analyze the number of patent applications and the number of scientific publications that are reflected in the databases of the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Web of Science for each cluster. As Kirill Purtov, head of the Department of Economic Policy and Development of the City of Moscow, noted, Moscow has 2060 patents and 58153 publications in these databases.

“The largest number of patents and publications in Moscow is in physics - 17 percent, and most of the authors represent the Russian Academy of Sciences,” the head of the departmentadded.

The authors of the study also included Lomonosov Moscow State University in the top 10 universities in countries with growing economies (excluding China) thanks to its high places in the QS World University Rankings and Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) for 2019.
Moscow's achievements in various fields are regularly recognized with prestigious Russian and international awards. Thus, the Russian capital entered the top 20 of the most promising technological cities in Europe, climbed 16 lines in the Smart City Index, and entered the top 20 of the digital transformation of cities rating.