Ukraine is among top 50 most innovative countries in the world – just.
According to the 2018 Bloomberg Innovation Index published on Jan. 23, Ukraine is in 46th place, one place above Cyprus and one below Thailand.
The index uses seven criteria to assess how innovative countries are, including research and development spending and numbers of publicly-owned information technology firms per capita. The 2018 ranking process involved more than 200 economies scored on a 0-100 scale.
While Ukraine’s IT Association claims Ukraine’s IT industry is continuing growing, ranking third in terms of revenues in Ukraine, Bloomberg reckons Ukraine (together with New Zealand) showed the worst results last year, each losing four places in the ranking.
“The biggest losers were New Zealand and Ukraine,” Bloomberg writes. “The productivity measure influenced New Zealand’s shift, while Ukraine was hurt by a lower tertiary-efficiency ranking.”
Ukraine has currently 1,650 IT companies, but only few of them are publicly-owned.
Microchip developer Intel closed its Ukrainian research and development office in 2017; while Russian tech companies Yandex and VKontakte were forced to leave Ukraine after Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree in May banning their websites in the county.
South Korea and Sweden are in the first and second places in the ranking, as they were last year. In fact, South Korea is the global-innovation leader for the fifth consecutive year.
Meanwhile, the United States dropped out of the top 10 for the first time in the six years the index has been published.
The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by Ciklum. The content is independent of the donors.
