Kazakhstan overtook Uzbekistan and topped Central Asia in innovation

Kazakhstan's leap has a nuance worth knowing before considering it a purely technological breakthrough.

The gist in brief

• In the Global Innovation Index 2026 (WIPO, 139 economies), Kazakhstan rose from 81st to 73rd place — its best result in the past decade and a jump of eight positions in a single year, reports DKNews.
• Uzbekistan rose from 79th to 77th place — up two positions; the country hit exactly the target set in advance by presidential decree for 2026.
• A year earlier, in GII 2025, Uzbekistan (79th place, 26.5 points) was ahead of Kazakhstan (81st place, 26.3 points). In 2026, the standings reversed.
• Before the index was published, Kazakhstan's permanent mission in Geneva conducted direct consultations with WIPO experts over the course of a year — on the methodology for calculating indicators, statistical sources, and their currency.

Kazakhstan: a leap of eight positions

Kazakhstan's progress is visible across both sub-indices at once. On Innovation Inputs (resources and conditions for innovation), the country rose from 75th to 73rd place — up 2 positions. On Innovation Outputs (actual innovation results) — from 84th to 73rd, up 11 positions at once. It was the second jump that provided the main contribution to the overall result: conditions for innovation improved moderately, while the system's performance improved noticeably more.

Over the past decade, Kazakhstan moved within a narrow corridor of 77th–83rd places: 77th in 2020, 79th in 2021, 83rd in 2022, 81st in 2023, a brief rise to 78th in 2024, and a new slide back to 81st in 2025. The 73rd place is the first exit beyond this corridor in many years.

The question worth asking: where the leap came from

Here a detail matters that cannot be overlooked when interpreting the numbers. During 2026, Kazakhstan's permanent mission in Geneva moved to direct consultations with WIPO experts — discussing the country's specific indicators, the methodology for calculating them, sources of international statistics, missing and outdated data, and the timeliness of submitting Kazakh statistics. At the initiative of the permanent mission, a separate online consultation was held between WIPO experts and government agencies, after which analytics with recommendations for the relevant ministries were prepared.

This does not mean the leap was fabricated — the index, as WIPO itself emphasizes, is built on a large array of indicators from international public and private sources, and working with outdated or missing data is a legitimate part of the methodology. But it does mean that the eight-position jump cannot automatically be considered the result of only actual technological progress in the economy. Part of the growth is probably a more complete and up-to-date submission of already existing data, rather than the emergence of new developments within a year.

Uzbekistan: a precise hit on target

Uzbekistan moved far more modestly — from 79th to 77th place, just 2 positions. But it was precisely 77th place that was officially set as the target for 2026 by the country's presidential decree of February 16, 2026 — and the country hit that target exactly. As with Kazakhstan, the greatest progress came in the output sub-index: Innovation Output rose from 92nd to 78th place, up 14 positions at once, while Innovation Input barely changed — 68th place versus 69th a year earlier.

In individual indicators, Uzbekistan's positions are noticeably higher than its overall ranking: second in the world by share of graduates in natural science and engineering specialties, third in entrepreneurial policy and culture, fourth in startup financing, 14th in utility models. Regionally, the country took fourth place among the 11 economies of Central and South Asia and eighth among 36 lower-middle-income countries — that is, higher than one might assume from its overall 77th place in the global table. Uzbekistan aims to enter the top 60 by 2030; for comparison, in 2015, when it first entered the index, the country was in 122nd place.

What remains a weak spot for both countries

For Kazakhstan, the areas named for further growth include R&D spending, university-business cooperation, venture financing, development of innovation clusters, software, and scientific and technical publications — limited venture capital and weak commercialization of intellectual property were cited by experts as constraining factors before as well. For Uzbekistan, the best position among the index's seven main blocks is institutions, 57th place, which in itself leaves much room for growth in the remaining categories.

It is telling that in parallel with the index's publication, another regional project was being discussed in Astana — a unified digital interoperability mechanism for all five Central Asian countries, proposed by business and experts. It could not have affected the current ranking — the idea was voiced after the data for GII 2026 had already been collected — but it is precisely such institutional and regulatory reforms that form the basis of Innovation Input indicators in subsequent years. A similar logic was captured by an earlier UN ESCAP report on digital infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region: the next digital divide in the region will be determined not by internet access but by countries' readiness to work with AI, and Kazakhstan figures there not only as an object of statistics but also as one of the institutional architects of regional dialogue — the host of the 2024 Astana Declaration.

Author's conclusion

Both neighbors in the region showed their best result in a long time in 2026, but achieved it in different ways. Uzbekistan moved predictably and moderately, hitting exactly the target laid out in a presidential decree several years in advance. Kazakhstan's leap looks more impressive on paper but requires a more cautious reading — part of the growth is probably linked to work on the quality and completeness of the data submitted, and not only to a real change in the innovation ecosystem within a single year. The real test for both countries will be not their place in the next ranking, but whether in the remaining years until 2030 they can close the structural gaps — in venture financing, research spending, and the link between science and business — that both reports name outright.