The Global Innovation Index 2025 makes for fascinating reading. As always, the findings are illuminating: Switzerland and Sweden remain on top, the US holds steady, China has broken into the top ten, and Germany has fallen out. But behind the headline shifts is a bigger story about what innovation really means.
The Index separates inputs, such as engineers, R&D budgets, infrastructure, and education, from outputs, such as patents, high-tech exports, and creative industries. What matters is not how much you put in, but how much you get out. Look closely and the picture is less of an innovation boom, more of an innovation mirage.
China is the poster child for scale. On inputs it looks unstoppable: millions of engineers graduate every year, the government pours billions into R&D, and the country has built one of the largest digital infrastructures in history. On outputs it also performs strongly, with patent filings, scientific publications, and high-tech exports placing it among the most efficient converters of investment into results. Yet the picture is uneven. Much of this output is concentrated in a few sectors such as electronics, telecoms, and artificial intelligence. That makes the system efficient on paper but narrow in practice. Innovation breadth, not just volume, is what creates resilience, and China’s concentration leaves it vulnerable to shocks in specific industries.
Switzerland shows the opposite model. Its population is smaller than some Chinese cities, its budgets finite, its scale modest. Yet it consistently outperforms larger economies by converting inputs into balanced outputs. Patents, exports, creative goods, productivity: Switzerland tops charts across multiple pillars. It leads the world not in volume, but in efficiency. Its strength lies in balance, with investments spread across education, institutions, and culture that generate not just activity but resilience. Switzerland proves that innovation is not a matter of size, but of systems that compound over time.
Germany tells a cautionary tale. For decades it embodied the link between strong industrial inputs and world-class outputs. But in 2025 its outputs are faltering. Patents are down relative to peers. Productivity growth has slowed. Exports of advanced goods no longer lead the pack. Its inputs remain impressive, with universities, infrastructure, and capital, but the efficiency of conversion is weakening. Germany has slipped out of the top 10, not because its foundations crumbled but because it failed to adapt while others accelerated. Innovation does not reward inertia.
The US remains the benchmark for converting scale into impact. Its inputs are immense, with R&D spend, top-tier universities, and venture capital depth, but its edge lies in outputs. American patents turn into global products. Its platforms export technology at scale. Its creative industries set the cultural agenda. The US continues to sit near the top of the Index not simply because of how much it invests, but because of how consistently it commercialises what it creates.
So the Global Innovation Index 2025 is not the story of an innovation boom. It is the story of fragile progress: rising numbers without rising resilience.
This should sound familiar to marketers. Our industry talks endlessly about innovation, but too often what we mean is new tools inside the discipline rather than greater impact outside it. Generative AI to make ads faster. Dashboards that churn out ROAS reports. Influencer marketplaces promising virality. These are inputs. They make us look busy. But inputs without outputs are vanity. The real test of marketing innovation is impact: memory built, trust earned, market share gained, pricing power delivered.
The next three years will separate the marketers who confuse activity with progress from those who innovate in ways that create real business impact.
AI and automation. Every brand will soon be able to make more ads, faster, cheaper. Output volume is about to explode. Distinctiveness will separate winners from losers. If everyone uses the same models, creative converges on mediocrity. The real innovation will not be in using AI, but in bending it to amplify what makes your brand unlike anyone else.
Measurement innovation. Forecasting is replacing reporting. Boards will care less about what happened last quarter and more about what will happen next quarter if spend is shifted or cut. Done well, this makes decision-making sharper. Done badly, it creates a black box nobody trusts. The innovation test here is not technical, but cultural: can marketers build confidence in forecasts without mistaking them for certainty?
Advertising innovation. The bigger opportunity is to innovate in how we reach people and the value we create when we do. Advertising has long defaulted to extracting more data from consumers. The smarter path is designing new Category Entry Points that expand how and when people can connect with a brand. That might mean reimagining stores as experiences, placements that serve as prompts rather than interruptions, or services that remove friction from everyday life. A bank branch that doubles as a community hub. A retailer that treats its shop floor as a social space. These are not gimmicks; they are advertising innovations that compound memory, expand categories, and generate both commercial and social dividends.
Organisational innovation. Teams are innovation systems in their own right. The best breakthroughs come when different specialisms are bridged and pointed towards a shared goal. Too often, organisations separate people by function, with planners in one place, creatives in another, and analysts somewhere else, as if innovation were an input to be tallied, not an output to be achieved. That fragmentation produces activity but limits impact. The companies that innovate best bring specialists together around the outcome they want to create, not the silo they come from.
Jean-Claude Biver understood this instinctively when he joined Audemars Piguet in the 1970s. Instead of being thrown straight into a sales role, he spent months embedded in the workshops, sitting with watchmakers, absorbing the culture, history, and craft of the company. He later said that period of apprenticeship was the most important of his career because it gave him the context to innovate meaningfully. He had to understand what made Audemars Piguet Audemars Piguet before he could add value.
That example highlights a tension in today’s fractional role economy. Bringing senior practitioners in one day a week can raise the floor of performance by injecting learned knowledge from elsewhere. However, there is a trade-off. Without immersion, without living the idiosyncrasies of how a business works, you risk innovation that is generic rather than transformative. Agility and flexibility are valuable, but continuity and memory are irreplaceable. The best organisations will find ways to use fractional talent to lift performance while still ensuring that deep context and embedded knowledge are protected.
And even when you get the structure right, balance still matters. Too much churn and no one builds mastery. Too much tenure and ideas stagnate. The organisations that combine continuity of codes with circulation of fresh perspectives are the ones that turn inputs into outputs most efficiently.
he labour market adds a broader provocation for the future. China’s gig workforce now numbers more than 200 million. It delivers flexibility and scale, but at the cost of continuity and compounding skills. Staff are treated as a commodity, to be flexed, replaced and cut as needed.
Europe and the UK sit at the other extreme, with one in four workers spending more than 20 years with the same employer. That creates depth, but it slows diffusion of ideas. The US sits between the two.
What happens if marketing follows China’s path? A discipline of freelancers, project specialists, and gig teams. The upside is speed and flexibility. The downside is fragility. Brands are built through consistency. Memory structures are reinforced over years. If the people making the work churn too fast, craft weakens, codes erode, and campaigns stop compounding. Innovation devolves into novelty.
The Global Innovation Index shows that innovation systems overloaded with inputs but weak on outputs eventually falter. Marketing faces the same risk. We can innovate endlessly in tools, structures, and tactics. But if the discipline itself becomes gigified, the compounding effect that makes brands powerful will disappear.
Reading the Global Innovation Index is always illuminating. This year it is also a reminder: the question for the next three years is not whether we can innovate more, but whether we can innovate better