Powered by software & data focus, India leads in intangible investment growth, says WIPO-LBS report
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India leads in intangible investment growth at 7.9%, among the 15 largest economies, a just released annual report - World Intangible Investment Highlights (WIIH) 2026, published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and Italy's Luiss Business School (LBS) shows.
Intangible assets which now make up a large and growing share of world gross domestic product (GDP) include organisational know-how, research and development (R&D), software and data, brands, design and other intellectual property (IP) assets. WIIH 2026 says that investment in intangible assets crossed the $ 10 trillion mark for the first time in 2025, with the US alone accounting for nearly half of the total.
The third edition of the WIIH covers 29 high- and middle-income economies, together about 57% of world GDP, adding the first-ever estimates for Canada and the Philippines and updated figures for Brazil, India and Japan.
It also sheds new light on intangible investment in emerging economies. For the first time, official data show intangible investment growing strongly beyond high-income countries. In India and the Philippines, intangible investment grew 5.3 and 3.9% annually over the past decade, respectively, exceeding the growth recorded in several high-income economies.
India stands out for its focus on software and databases, which account for nearly 45% of its total intangible investment in 2023 – the highest in the sample, reflecting its large information technology and software services sector, WIIH says. Organizational capital accounts for a further 21.8% of India’s intangible investment, while brands (9.3%) make up a smaller but growing share, it adds.
Japan (4.8% growth), Philippines (4.6 %) and the US (4.4%) are the other economies that registered fast growth in investment in intangible assets in recent years, the report says.
According to WIIH, intangible investment has grown 5.5% annually between 2020 and 2025, compared with 3.2% for tangible investment. It now accounts for nearly 13% of GDP across the economies covered, marking a durable structural shift in the composition of investment.
The report also highlights how artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating investment through two distinct waves. While the first is a tangible, infrastructure-driven wave of data centres, semiconductors, power systems and networks required to run advanced AI models, the second is a broader wave of intangible investment, as firms invest in data, software, R&D, brands, organizational capital and training.