Ukraine has made an unexpected leap in Bloomberg’s annual global index of Top 50 most innovative countries. Over the past year our country improved its position from 49th to 33rd, surpassing Hong Kong, Iceland, Brazil, and others. In the category of postsecondary education Ukraine has made it to the fifth place, only falling behind South Korea, Russia, Finland, and Israel. In terms of patents number we are in the Top 10, along with the US, Britain, Germany, and Russia.
Apart from education and patents the index takes into account four other measures: the number of high-tech companies (Ukraine found itself on 35th position in this category), R&D centers (42nd), research personnel (41st), and manufacturing (50th). Bloomberg’s research also names world Top 10 innovative companies – save Chinese Tencent, it is composed solely of American corporations. Apple retains the lead, Microsoft and Google are second and third respectively.
Until this time, Ukraine’s highest place was 42-nd in the Global Innovation Index of 2013. Also, the Innovation Cities rating includes multiple Ukrainian entrants: Kyiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Simferopol, and Sevastopol. However, all of them are located in the lower part of the 455-position list. Lviv enjoys the highest stance among them (350th), followed by Kyiv (361st).
What has secured our rise in the rankings, notwithstanding the crisis the past year had brought to our economy? How will this affect the domestic IT-industry further? The Day asked Dmytro Sholomko, director of Google Ukraine for a comment.
“Most probably, the improvement of Ukraine’s standing reflects the acknowledgement of the fact that we should be observed, and that we are an important market showing great prospect as an innovation center. Our education level has always been high, but we would need an improvement in all the other measures.
“Upon the detailed examination of 2014 and 2015 rankings, one can easily understand what factor had allowed us to climb this far. Above all, it happened thanks to improvement in our patent ranking and increase in high-tech companies and R&D personnel. I think the main reason of such a change in ranking is that Ukraine’s measures are now finally properly examined and calculated on the international scale. Additionally, the events of 2014 have encouraged the worldwide attention to our country. This can urge more and more global R&D companies to recognize that Ukraine hosts their development process, Ukrainian companies register their patents and Ukrainian engineers work on their projects. Previously many were reluctant to admit it.
“Nonetheless, Ukraine’s ratings in science and manufacturing are appalling. I can only hope that such imbalance between patents, education, and software development on the one hand as opposed to research and manufacturing on the other would compel the government and business to endorse these particular fields of innovation.”
