India climbs to 38th in the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2025. Here’s what the ranking tells us about the country’s innovation story, and how Marico Innovation Foundation is working to deepen and sustain this progress.
The Global Innovation Index (GII) 2025, released by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in September 2025, has once again reaffirmed why it is considered one of the world’s most influential assessments of national innovation capacity.
Covering 139 economies and 78 indicators, the landmark Index tracks R&D spending, infrastructure to venture capital activity, startup financing, intellectual property, and creative outputs.
At its core, the GII brings together two big lenses: innovation inputs—such as institutions, talent, infrastructure, market and business sophistication, and innovation outputs, which capture knowledge creation, technology development, and creative goods and services.
This makes the GII a powerful diagnostic tool for fast-growing economies like India. It does not merely assess investment levels but measures how effectively those investments translate into real innovation outcomes.
India recorded one of its strongest performances yet in GII 2025, climbing to 38th among 139 economies globally. India has also been recognised as an “innovation overperformer” for 15 consecutive years.
In 2025, India ranks first among the 37 lower-middle-income group economies and remains the top-performing nation in Central and Southern Asia. This puts India in a small group of countries from the Global South that are steadily climbing the innovation ladder, even as the top ranks of the Index is occupied by established innovation powerhouses such as Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, South Korea, and Singapore. China has entered the top 10 for the first time.
Amid these high-income and heavily R&D-driven economies, India’s steady climb into the top 40 also stands out for a different reason: it has achieved strong innovation outputs without proportional growth in input indicators.
A closer look at India’s performance reveals a mix of standout strengths and persistent gaps.
India leads the world in ICT (Information and Communication Technology) services exports and ranks among the top economies globally when it comes to late-stage venture capital activity, unicorn evaluation—all signals of a digital and startup ecosystem that is able to attract capital, build brands and create intellectual property.
At the same time, the GII and related analyses highlight areas where India still has work to do. The country’s R&D spending remains low—at around 0.65 percent of GDP. Infrastructure and university-industry linkages also require strengthening, as does the broader ecosystem for translating research into marker ready solutions.
Marico Innovation Foundation (MIF) addresses some of these challenges in India’s innovation landscape—especially when it comes to breakthrough technologies and enterprises that solve complex problems while creating large-scale social, economic and environmental impact.
MIF’s Scale-Up Program, a no-equity accelerator, offers long-term, tailored mentorship that helps early-stage ventures transition into scalable, sustainable businesses. Over the years, more than 50 innovations have been scaled through Scale-Up, supported by 100+ mentors across 15+ sectors. Many of these startups work in areas that matter for India’s innovation story —from clean technology and plastic waste management to agri-technology and circular economy models.
The Indian Innovation Icons Awards is a national platform for currently hidden, potentially game-changing Indian innovations creating socio-economic or environmental impact. In the 2025 edition, MIF celebrated innovators such as Astrome Technologies, Skyroot Aerospace, Indra Water and Chara Technologies, whose work spans next-generation connectivity, space technologies, decentralised wastewater treatment and sustainable electric mobility. These innovators represent the kind of advanced, knowledge-driven sectors that will shape India’s global innovation footprint and contribute to strengthening GII output pillars.
At the 2025 InnoWin Day, MIF curated a high-impact forum designed to connect the Indian Innovation Icons winners and Scale-Up startups with corporates, investors, and policy leaders. 24 innovators and more than a dozen major companies came together to create opportunities for pilots, partnerships, and commercialisation.
Complementing this work is MIF’s Knowledge Library, an evolving repository of shared learnings on sectors that need attention.
The GII 2025 makes two things clear: India’s innovation ascent is real. But the journey is far from complete. Strong outputs must now be matched by stronger inputs: deeper R&D investments, stronger academic linkages, better infrastructure, and consistent support for frontier technologies.
As India’s innovation journey is accelerating, MIF aims to play a key role in bridging these gaps and creating meaningful impact.
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