EMDERLT

The Emerging and Developing Economies Research Lab Tracker

Samuel Edet, Ralf Martin, Golvine de Rochambeau & Trang Thu Tran

Most innovation happens in high-income countries (HICs). But this does not mean that there is no innovation happening in emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) — and it certainly does not mean that such innovation is not economically meaningful. For instance, we find that green technology from EMDEs is on average of high economic value. In this tool we gather information on the research institutions — both private and public — behind this research and innovation. We report the results of an extensive and ongoing data-gathering exercise in which we collect and cross-reference labs from multiple pipelines:

1. The Scoreboard pipeline. Every firm in the EU Industrial R&D Scoreboard (JRC) — the world's ∼2,000 largest R&D-investing companies — is screened for named research labs in EMDEs, prioritised by its developing-country patent activity and then by its global R&D budget (the latter catches big R&D spenders that patent little, e.g. Maruti Suzuki, Ubisoft, NetEase). Firms headquartered in developing countries themselves are included (Huawei, BYD, Alibaba, TCS, Embraer, Reliance Jio …).
2. The patent-assignee pipeline. Starting from the patent data itself, we rank all patent assignees — the companies, universities and national research councils that own the patents — by the number of innovations they own that were invented in a developing country, and verify the research labs behind them. This surfaces the domestic owners of EMDE innovation that a list of global R&D spenders misses.

Every dot is a named lab verified from public sources (hover for what it does, click for sources). Where the institution can be matched to the patent data, its popup links to an Espacenet search of its patents, and dots can be coloured by patent quality — average forward citations or average Patent Rank¹, computed only over the patents that can be mapped to the lab's host country (an inventor or the patent assignee is located there), shown relative to the world-average innovation (red = above, blue = below), for all innovations or green technologies only. Note that these are live data pipelines that get updated daily.