London Toppled by Tokyo as World's Most Innovative City

London has lost its pole position at the top of the Innovation Cities Index, an accolade it had held since 2015, to Tokyo.

The Innovation Cities Index is a global, annual listing of 500 of the world's most innovative cities, ranked according to 162 indicators by the Innovation Cities program. The cities are assigned one of four classifications, in ascending order -- Nexus, Hub, Node and Upstart -- though some at the bottom of the ranking receive no classification at all.

From the 162 indicators, all cities then receive an index score, which determines their place on the list: Both Tokyo and London, for reference, have a current score of 56.

London had held first place since the 2015 edition of the rankings, with the 2016-2017 ranking -- the Index covered two years, not one as in 2018 and 2015 -- showing New York as the UK capital's main challenger, with current leader Tokyo third.

London had risen quickly through the Index: in 2010, the city was 14th, behind other major tech hubs such as Toronto, Berlin and Amsterdam. However, by 2012 it was seventh, and in 2014 had risen to third. This rapid rise shows how much progress London has made in just a few short years to become a technology and innovation hub.

The full 2018 index ranks 500 cities, from Tokyo at the top to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the bottom, although the last city with a classification is Bolivia's capital Le Paz, in 482nd place.

It's interesting to note the progress, or not, of other cities too. Boston -- the home of world-leading Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) -- was the top-ranked city for three years running, but now languishes in seventh. Paris suffered a similar fate, as the French capital slipped to ninth this year, having held second place in 2010. In fact, in the top five, only one city from the 2010 index remains -- New York. In the top ten, only four cities remain.

During that time, the technology landscape has changed dramatically: In 2010, AI was far from being a technology that played a role in smart cities or in people's homes, as it does now, while blockchain was little known, except to computer scientists and researchers, and bitcoin was worth a tiny fraction of the value it holds today.

Phil Oakley, Site Editor, TechX365