TEHRAN – Tehran is amongst the world’s top 500 innovation cities of 2018 based on the Innovation Cities Index, released by the Innovation Cities Program.

There are four regional indexes for Americas, Europe, Asia and Emerging, extracted from the main Global index.

Ranking cities for innovation, Tehran is 413rd city on the list worldwide. The city ranks 19 amongst 53 countries in emerging category of the index.

Tehran is categorized as NODE city on the list. According to its website, all cities are classified based on Index Scores into four classifications by score; NEXUS (City is a critical nexus for large number of economic and social innovation segments),  HUB (City has dominance on key economic and social innovation segments based on current global trends), NODE (City has a strong performance across many innovation segments, with key imbalances or issues) and UPSTART (City has potential strong future performance, with some further improvement).

Tokyo, London and San Francisco are on the top of the list followed by New York and Los Angeles.

With the motto of ‘city innovation comes from being more local, while going global’, the index assessed the cities based on the three factors of Cultural Assets, Human Infrastructure and Networked Markets.

This city rankings include technology, smart, startups and other aspects of a good city to live, work and play based on economic opportunity for innovators. The Innovation Cities Indexes measure each city’s potential as an innovation economy at the current time, since 2007.

Mobility, in other world public transport and personal mobility is a critical part of Human Infrastructure that is excluded in the use of the term 'Smart Cities', is included in Innovation City ranking.

The Innovation Cities Program is done based on assessing innovation pre-conditions via examining 162 indicators (that use up to 1300 data points), which are benchmarked. 

SB/MQ/MG