Sweden: Europe’s most innovative?

Sweden has once again taken second place in the Global Innovation Index (GII) and has the largest number of European patent applications per capita of the European countries in 2020, according to the European Patent Office (EPO). In this article, we compare Sweden with the top-ranked index leader, Switzerland, and analyse what needs to be done in order to achieve a top position in the coming years.

The EPO’s 2020 patent statistics shows that Sweden ranks second in Europe based on the number of European patent applications filed with the EPO per million inhabitants (figure 1).

Figure 1: Country ranking based on the ratio of number of European patent applications filed at the European Patent Office per million inhabitants.