Visitors enter the Shenzhen World Exhibition and Convention Center for the 2025 Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area International Auto Show in Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong Province, May 31, 2025. (Xinhua/Liang Xu)

Shenzhen - The Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou innovation cluster in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has ranked top of the world's 100 leading innovation clusters in the 2025 Global Innovation Index, which was released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on Monday.

This is the first time the cluster has surpassed Japan's Tokyo-Yokohama cluster to become the world's leading innovation hub, highlighting the robust vitality of scientific and technological innovation in the Greater Bay Area, as well as the dynamic progress the international center for technological innovation has achieved.

The Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou innovation cluster had since 2020 consistently ranked second globally.

The 2025 innovation cluster ranking process included a new core indicator, venture capital transaction volume, which was added to existing key considerations of Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) international patent applications and the number of papers each cluster had seen published in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) journals. This new evaluation system emphasizes the output and layout of intellectual property, and also highlights the transformation, application and value realization of innovation outcomes, according to the provincial market supervision and administration bureau of Guangdong.

This year, the world's top 100 innovation clusters are distributed across 33 economies. With 24, China is home to the highest number of these clusters, followed by the United States with 22 and Germany with 7.