By Donald Zuhn —

Scientific American has released its second annual examination of the ways in which governments, scientists, industry players, and life science stakeholders are advancing biotechnology innovation around the globe.  The special edition of the consumer science magazine, entitled "Worldview: A Global Biotechnology Perspective," explores biotech's most compelling trends and developments worldwide.

The issue, which was prepared in collaboration with the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), includes the Worldview Scorecard, a list of innovation-capacity scores for 39 countries.  Also included in the issue are a number of articles, such as "Back From The Brink," which looks at economic signs around the world that indicate an improving environment for biotechnology, and a series of articles examining biotechnology in China.

The Worldview Scorecard ranks countries according to their capacities to develop biotechnology, and presents data on a wide range of other topics, including the impact of public policies on biotechnology.  Overall innovation-capacity scores were computed by assessing each country's performance in several individual metrics (e.g., intellectual property protection) on a scale from 0 to 10, with the lowest-ranked country scored as 0 and the highest-ranked country scored as 10 (an explanation regarding the methodology employed by the editors can be found here).  The top dozen countries on this year's scorecard (with final scores) were:

1. United States – 37
2. Singapore – 31
3. Canada – 29
4. Sweden – 28
5. Denmark – 27
5. Finland – 27
5. Israel -27
8. France – 26
8. Iceland – 26
8. Japan – 26
8. Netherlands – 26
8. Switzerland – 26

With regard to IP scores, the United States received the top score (10.00) and Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, and the Netherlands all received scores of 9.05.  The lowest IP scores were given to Iceland (3.82), Brazil (4.18), Russia (4.59), India (4.95), and Mexico (5.49).  A full list of scores can be viewed here.