Trajectories of the Global Innovation Index and Its Bibliometric Footprint: From the Global Level to Ecuador and Peru

This article examines how the Global Innovation Index (GII) has become the dominant technical language for assessing and legitimizing countries’ innovation performance, and what this implies for middle-income economies such as Ecuador and Peru. We conduct a systematic review of 89 Scopus-indexed studies, combining bibliometrics with natural language processing of abstracts. The results reveal a largely optimistic discourse that frames innovation as a national, systemic construct—structured around institutions, human capital, infrastructure, market and business sophistication—while relying heavily on standardized GII metrics. Topic modeling and sentiment analysis show limited critical scrutiny of the index itself. The comparative analysis of Ecuador and Peru highlights persistent gaps between innovation inputs and outputs, with Peru leading in human capital and markets but lagging in business sophistication, and Ecuador constrained by institutional and market weaknesses. We argue that the GII should be used as a diagnostic and reform tool, not merely as a reputational ranking.