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| Jodrell Bank Telescope Author: Glyn Drury Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Greater Manchester remains in the World Intellectual Property Organisation's Global Innovation Index Ranking of the Top 100 Innovation Clusters for the second year running, though its position has dropped from 94th in 2025 to 97th now. The clusters that have overtaken it include Riyadh, which entered the Top 100 for the first time, Ningde which leapt from 99th place in 2025 to 75th in 2026 and Zhenjiang, which rose to 94th from 100th last year.
According to WIPO, Manchester accounted for 935 PCT applications, 11,486 scientific articles and 590 venture capital deals over the most recent five-year period on a fractional basis. The top PCT applicants were Microsmass UK Limited, the University of Manchester and Prevayl Innovations Ltd. Manchester University accounted for 74% of the cluster's publications, followed by Manchester Metropolitan University with 7% and the University of Salford with 4%.
Other British clusters in the top 100 were London, which remained in 8th place for the second year running, Cambridge which dropped from 69th to 71st place and Oxford which dropped from 77th to 84th place between 2025 and 2026. As I reported in “What Manchester does today, the rest of the world does tomorrow” on 9 Sept 2025, the top 100 innovation clusters are concentrated in 5 countries, namely China with 25, the USA with 20, Germany with 7 and India and the UK with 4 each.
As a Mancunian, I relish the bragging rights over Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool which this cluster ranking allows, but I have wondered more than once whether it has any greater significance. Darren Tang, WIPO's Director General, seems to think that it does because he describes the world's leading clusters as "building blocks of national innovation ecosystems" in the press release "WIPO GII: Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou, Tokyo-Yokohama, San Jose-San Francisco, Seoul and Beijing Are World’s Biggest Innovation Clusters", Geneva, 8 Sept 2026.
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