The report uses macroeconomic analysis and includes case studies to examine the role of intellectual property and other intangibles in the global economy.

The report was first published in 2011 under the direction of Francis Gurry with the objective of providing evidence of the role of innovation for the economies of all United Nations member states.

[3] Different from past editions of the report, this issue offers a new methodological framework and three case studies on agriculture technology, motorcycles and video games.

Main Contributors: Ricardo Hausmann (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University), Muhammed A. Yildirim, Christian Chacua, Matte Hartog y Shreyas Gadgin Matha, Gregory D. Graf, Paolo Aversa (King's College London), Hakan Özalp (Amsterdam Business School).

It focuses on the role of innovation in opening up growth possibilities and creating solutions to global challenges such as climate change and pandemics.

The macro analysis of global trends is complemented by two case studies of technological fields undergoing rapid change – autonomous vehicles and agricultural biotechnology.

For patents, the share of international co-inventions increased to 11 percent until 2009, but has since slightly fallen, partly because of rapid growth in domestic collaborations in certain countries.

The largest ten of them – San Francisco-San Jose, New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Boston, Shanghai, London, Beijing, Bengaluru, and Paris – account for 26 percent of all international co-inventions.

Main Contributors: Sören Petersen, Marcus Höpperger, Atif Ansar, Carol Corrado, Emmanuelle Fortune, Carl Benedikt Frey, Georg von Graevenitz, Janet Hao, Christian Helmers, Laurence Joly, Benjamin Mitra-Kahn, Sridhar Moorthy, Amanda Myers and Philipp Schautschick.

Main Contributors: Josh Lerner and Eric Lin (Harvard Business School), Suma Athreye, José Miguel Benavente, Daniel Goya, Ove Granstand, Keun Lee, Sadao Nagaoka, Jerry Thursby, Marie Thursby, Yong Yang and María Pluvia Zuñiga (WIPO).

The World Intellectual Property Report draws from WIPO Statistics Database, which has a data collection of patents, utility models, trademarks, industrial designs, microorganisms, plant variety protection, geographical indications and the creative economy.