SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure | SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy | SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals
Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) | Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY) | Department of Science & Technology (DST)
The 2026 WIPO report, Technology on the Move, reveals a historic transformation in how innovation travels, showing that adoption lags between advanced and developing economies are narrowing faster than ever before. Drawing on 250 years of evidence, the report highlights that while the telegraph took 50 years to diffuse, Generative AI (GenAI) reached global users within days of launch.
WIPO identifies four critical factors—technology traits, information flows, absorptive capacity, and supportive policy/IP frameworks—that determine diffusion speed.
Crucially, the report notes a “Usage Paradox” where middle-income economies like India demonstrate higher-than-predicted GenAI usage relative to their GDP, signaling a massive digital leapfrogging opportunity.
However, deep-tech leadership remains highly concentrated, as advanced economies demonstrate a much faster rate of breakthrough reuse, often recombining foreign-origin inventions within five years to maintain their competitive edge.
Four Critical Factors Shaping Global Diffusion
Factor 1: Technology Traits (Modularity & Complexity): Simpler, modular technologies (like Solar PV or mobile apps) diffuse rapidly, whereas complex systems requiring massive infrastructure (like EV charging networks or smart grids) take decades to reach significant market share.
Factor 2: Information & Talent Flows (The Citation Gap): The time to the first international patent citation has halved over 50 years, with the gap between domestic and international knowledge sharing nearly disappearing by 2020.
Factor 3: Local Absorptive Capacity (The “Muscle” of Adoption): A nation’s ability to turn global tools into local growth depends on its technical training, R&D depth, and foundational literacy. While digital tools are narrowing global gaps, persistent infrastructure disparities, such as limited 5G access in Africa, underscore the importance of absorptive capacity in enabling faster economic growth and development, as seen in countries like India.
Factor 4: Public Policy & IP Frameworks (The Steering Wheel): Balanced IP systems and regulatory agility are essential for transforming technological prototypes into real-world industrial impact, especially in high-stakes fields like biotech and clean energy.
What is the “Breakthrough Reuse Gap”? The breakthrough reuse gap refers to the disparity in how quickly different nations can take a foreign invention and recombine it into new, domestic innovations. Innovation leaders, such as the United States, demonstrate an intensive reuse pattern—for example, reusing 70% of Chinese breakthrough technologies within just five years. In contrast, many developing economies, including India, experience significant lags in domestic recombination. This suggests that technological leadership is determined not just by the count of “Inventions” (what you create), but by the speed of “Absorption and Recombination” (how fast you build upon what others have created).
Policy Relevance
For India, the WIPR 2026 findings represent a transition from “Fast Adopter” to “Deep-Tech Leader,” where the focus must shift from using global tools to recombining them for sovereign industrial depth.
Bypassing the GDP-AI Link: India’s high GenAI usage intensity validates the IndiaAI Mission’s strategy of democratizing compute access, allowing the country to leapfrog traditional development stages.
Standardizing “Frugal” Agri-Tech: By investing in precision agriculture for low-connectivity regions, India is acting as a “Standard Maker” move, creating a template for other global South nations.
Operationalizing Breakthrough Reuse: Strengthening science-industry linkages is critical to closing the “reuse gap,” ensuring that Indian startups can rapidly recombine global deep-tech breakthroughs for domestic manufacturing.
Federal Infrastructure Expansion: Closing the internet penetration gap and expanding 5G/broadband is foundational to ensuring that the digital adoption gains do not plateau.
Implementation Fidelity via IP Modernization: Streamlining regulatory frameworks in biotech and clean energy will accelerate the diffusion of complex technologies that typically face 16+ year regulatory lags.
Follow the full report here: Technology on the Move