What if the US Isn't the World's Most Innovative Country?

Why not China or even Singapore? A new book suggests that there are lots of different innovation races with different end points and measures of success.

- Adrian Wooldridge

One of the barriers to understanding the world is our fixation on sports thinking: Who is winning and who is catching up? This has long been true of politics – we focus obsessively on the race for the White House while ignoring the debt mountain that may bring the whole system crashing down.

It is also becoming true of business. We tend to look at the race for number one without thinking more generally about what being in the lead, in this industry or that niche, means.

Looked at through this sports prism, the innovation landscape is simple. The US is still far ahead. America is responsible for almost all the breakthrough technologies that define the current era (AI, smartphones, social networks) just as it was responsible for all the breakthrough technologies that defined the last era (PCs, the internet, semiconductors).

Three of the world's most consequential AI companies – OpenAI, Anthropic and Databricks – are headquartered within about 3km of each other in San Francisco. Nvidia is so dominant in the market for high-end chips that one commentator remarks that "there's a war going on in AI out there, and Nvidia is the only arms dealer".

Yet China is breathing down America's neck – and in some areas, such as surveillance and hypersonic rockets, it is taking the lead. The most cited paper on AI, known as the ResNet paper, was written by four Chinese scholars who have never studied outside the country. More than 1,300 foreign companies have opened advanced scientific research labs in China to tap the country's growing talent pool.

And Europe? The combined value of all the tech companies on the continent is far less than the value of just one US company, Microsoft.

But what happens if we go beyond the sports metaphor? A new book by Mr Mehran Gul of the World Economic Forum,