Soumitra Dutta, former dean of Oxford’s Said Business School, is a co-creator of the Global Innovation Index, the world’s most influential innovation ranking system. Covering 130-140 countries every year, GII uses around 80 specific metrics spanning seven pillars (Institutions, Human Capital & Research, Infrastructure, Market Sophistication, Business Sophistication, Knowledge & Technology Outputs, Creative Outputs) to measure innovation performance. It is published annually by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Cornell University (USA) and INSEAD. More than 90 governments now use GII to make policy decisions. “When I created the GII, my goal was to capture the full spectrum of innovation, especially those efforts beyond traditional measures. Since WIPO adopted the GII in 2010, our definition of innovation has broadened, now encompassing areas like social entrepreneurship and impact — key themes in this year’s report,” said Soumitra Dutta in 2024. Switzerland has topped the GII rankings for 15 consecutive years since 2011, including in 2025. The 2025 report ranks Switzerland first in innovation outputs and second in innovation inputs. “Countries like Switzerland and Norway invest in the entire innovation chain. That means having research institutions, human capital, and good quality infrastructure, all of which must be strong and well coordinated. These are countries that have excellent universities that also maintain robust partnerships with the private sector,” said Soumitra Dutta,Oxford Dean (Former) in an interview to a Brazilian publication. Another country that has been consistently impressive in GII rankings is China. Over the past decade or so, Soumitra Dutta, who’s also an author of several books and an entrepreneur, has tracked, analysed and even predicted China’s rise in innovation. "China has been investing for many years on some basic elements, for example, human capital and research and infrastructure...China is doing a lot of right things, China is on a right path," said Soumitra Dutta in 2017. In 2025, China entered the top 10 in GII rankings for the first time. As of 2025, China leads globally in knowledge and technology outputs, patent filings, and hosts the most top 100 innovation clusters, with Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou ranked 1st. China is the only middle-income economy in the top 30 in GII. China’s rise has a lot to do with its investments in AI, semiconductors, and green technologies. Soumitra Dutta Oxford Dean (Former) had touched upon China’s innovation strategy in 2017, and his points are still relevant. “What we see is that China is investing on several fronts, like infrastructure, domestic industry, and human capital. In recent years, the research carried out there has been directed toward generating a high number of patents and publications… This has been possible thanks to an environment that favors collaboration between universities and companies,” said Soumitra Dutta, whose ResearchGate profile lists a book chapter titled ‘China and the US in the new Internet world: a comparative perspective’.

Soumitra Dutta Oxford Dean (Former) says China is a case study in absorption․ They are capable of completely absorbing outside developments and innovating further․ More than two decades ago, China focused on innovation as a national strategy, and it resolved that by 2020 China would be one of the top 20 innovation economies in the world․ Actually, China exceeded that target, Dutta said in his 2025 appearance on The Innovation Civilization Podcast․ China did not simply import technology, but built the intellectual infrastructure to metabolize it by massively expanding its university system, doubling its yearly output of college graduates in the early 2000s and then doubling that again․ In Beijing, Tsinghua University and Peking University, ranked in the top twenty in the world today, benefited from two decades of sustained funding․ Then came the absorption․ Solar technology․ High speed rail․ Semiconductor design․ Large language models․ China took each, learned it in-depth, then went beyond․ DeepSeek is perhaps the latest and most visible example of taking something, further polishing, then open sourcing it to the world․ "And it's true that some people might say China has copied some things․ But guess what? In innovation, people copy each other all the while․ If it works, yeah․ It works․ It's normal," Dutta says.