Based on data released on September 8 by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Chengdu has secured the 21st position in the Global Innovation Index's top 100 science and technology innovation clusters for 2026. This marks a rise of three places from the previous year, positioning the city 7th nationally among innovation clusters and maintaining its leadership role across western China. Notably, among the top 30 clusters worldwide, Chengdu recorded the most significant upward movement.
In this year's ranking, a total of 25 Chinese clusters made it into the global top 100, keeping the country's leading position in terms of the number of listed clusters for four consecutive years. Since its debut on the list in 2018, Chengdu has climbed from 56th to 21st place, accumulating a 35-position rise over eight years and demonstrating consistent growth in its innovative momentum.
The improvement in Chengdu's global innovation cluster ranking is rooted in its solid work on intellectual property. In recent years, the city's market regulation and IP authorities have launched special campaigns to promote the application of patents. These efforts have guided 78 universities and research institutes to catalog their existing patents, totaling 68,000 items, of which 37,000 have entered the national patent transformation repository and 4,413 have achieved industrial application. The province and city have jointly established 49 high-value patent cultivation centers, continuously reinforcing the role of enterprises as primary innovators and progressively nurturing 59 national-level IP demonstration enterprises and 69 provincial-level IP-strong firms.
Since the start of the 14th Five-Year Plan period, Chengdu has seen 75 patents win the China Patent Award, including two gold medals and eight silver medals. The city has also advanced a diversified approach to resolving intellectual property disputes, actively exploring flexible solutions such as benefit-sharing, cross-licensing, and collaborative development. These measures have effectively safeguarded the benefits of high-value patent commercialization. By June 2026, the city had mediated 942 IP-related disputes, fostering healthy competition within its industries.
The latest statistics show that as of June 2026, Chengdu holds 144,900 valid invention patents, a year-on-year increase of 15.64%. High-value invention patents stand at 64,200, up 6.1% quarter-on-quarter, with the per-capita high-value invention patent count reaching 29.82 per 10,000 people. In the first half of this year, the city granted 31,000 patents, an 8.38% increase year-on-year. Among these, invention patent grants totaled 11,700, surging 29.09% and raising their share to 38%, indicating an ongoing optimization of the patent structure.
Officials from the Chengdu Market Supervision Administration have stated that the next steps will focus on solidifying the rapid growth of high-value patents, accelerating their application and transformation, strengthening patent navigation and patent pool layouts, and enhancing comprehensive protection across the IP chain. These efforts aim to empower deeper integration of technological innovation and industrial innovation, contributing further to the nation's goals of building a robust intellectual property framework.