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USA vs. Canada: Which Country is the Most Innovative? [Chart]

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USA vs. Canada: Which is the Most Innovative Country? [Chart]

USA vs. Canada: Which is the Most Innovative Country? [Chart]

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

This week, an in-depth report on global innovation was co-released by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization. The 2015 version of the report is not for the faint of heart: it clocks in at 453 pages long and covers a total of 141 countries that make up 98.6% of global GDP.

The methodology of the report uses innovation inputs and outputs to create an overall Global Innovation Index with a score for each country. Inputs include factors such as institutions, human capital, infrastructure, market sophistication, and business sophistication. Outputs deal with actual innovation results such as knowledge, technology, and creative outputs.

Lastly, there is also a curious measure which divides outputs by inputs to find an “efficiency” factor: in other words, which countries are getting the most bang for their buck in terms of innovation.

Global Innovation Index Framework:
Innovation Index Framework

The data is quite granular, and each innovation score is based on 79 variables. Rather than comparing all countries together, we decided to look at Canada and the United States to see which of the 49th parallel neighbors is the most innovative country. If you’d prefer to read an executive summary of the report itself, there is an abstract here that includes more analysis on other countries such as Switzerland and the United Kingdom, which came in first and second place respectively in the overall rankings.

USA vs. Canada

Many of the wealthy countries in the report, including Canada and the United States, have a quality set of inputs for innovation: world-class universities, fair regulatory environments, sophisticated economies, and strong knowledge workers.

However, the report shows a few big differences specifically between Canada and the United States that are worth noting.

Firstly, the “quality of innovation” in the United States is higher. University performance, the reach of scholarly articles, the international dimension of patent applications, and other such measures have the USA as the top place within the entire high-income group, followed by countries such as the UK, Japan, Germany, and Switzerland.

This helps the United States get a better score than Canada in terms of Knowledge and Technology Outputs, which make up half of the formula for the overall index. The United States scores a 58.0 on those outputs, while Canada scores 41.9.

Next, the United States holds the top position globally in measures concerning Market Sophistication, which gives it a score of 81.5 compared to Canada’s 73.5 in that category. Canada almost makes up for this with its strong institutions. In terms of Business Environment (a sub-category to “Institutions”) Canada has the best ranking in the world. However, the United States has strong institutions as well, and the difference here is only 5.9 points.

Lastly, Canada’s score was impacted by its weakness in the Human Capital and Research category, where it dropped from 13th to 22nd in ranking since the previous year’s report. This weakness is described by the authors as being linked to “government spending on secondary education per pupil, where [Canada] ranks 65th”.

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The World’s Biggest Cloud Computing Service Providers

Cloud computing service providers generated $270 billion in revenues last year, concentrated among a few giants.

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This tree map shows the biggest cloud computing service providers globally by market share.

The World’s Biggest Cloud Computing Service Providers

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Today, the three largest cloud computing service providers command 66% of the global market.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have generated billions in revenues through their cloud infrastructure that provide the computing power companies need to store data. What’s more, most AI models are run on the cloud, creating a surge in computing demand for cloud providers.

The above graphic shows the largest cloud providers globally, based on data from Synergy Research Group.

Breaking Down the Cloud Market

Here are the world’s top cloud computing service providers based on enterprise revenues as of the fourth quarter of 2023:

ProviderCountryMarket Share Q4 2023
Amazon Web Services🇺🇸 U.S.31%
Microsoft Azure🇺🇸 U.S.24%
Google Cloud🇺🇸 U.S.11%
Alibaba Cloud🇨🇳 China4%
Salesforce🇺🇸 U.S.3%
IBM Cloud🇺🇸 U.S.2%
Oracle🇺🇸 U.S.2%
Tencent Cloud🇨🇳 China2%
Other🌐 Other21%

With 31% of the global market share, Amazon’s cloud division posted $24.2 billion in revenues over the quarter.

AWS is a major cash engine for the company, but growth slowed over 2023 as enterprises and startups cut back on tech spending. Annual sales growth compared to the same quarter last year grew by 13%—far below competitors Microsoft and Google, whose cloud divisions grew by 30% and 26%, respectively.

As we can see, U.S. firms make up the lion’s share of the market, while China’s Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud together comprise 5% of the global share.

The AI Boom and the Cloud

Given that a significant chunk of AI models are run on the cloud, the industry may be positioned to see greater demand as momentum accelerates.

In fact, newer AI systems are as much as 10 to 100 times larger than older models. In line with this, major cloud providers are seeing high demand for cloud services to allow companies across financial to manufacturing sectors to run large language models on their platforms.

Today, 98% of companies globally rely on the cloud for at least one part of their business applications, which may present a market opportunity for the industry as advancements in AI continue to grow.

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