Malaysia is second highest in ranking among its regional peers in terms of the level of innovation capacity and performance, said Peter Willimott, senior programme officer, World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).

Willimott said that each year the organisation would work with Cornell University and business school, INSEAD, to co-publish the Global Innovation Index.

"This publication recognises the key role of innovation as a driver of economic growth and well-being. It aims to capture the multi-dimensional facets of innovation to be applicable to developed and emerging economies alike.

"It looks at 143 country profiles and ranks each country's innovation capabilities and results based on 81 data tables for indicators from over 30 international and private sources," he told Bernama.

Overall, Willimott said, Malaysia was ranked 33rd globally which was second highest ranking among Asean countries.

Willimott said some of Malaysia's areas of strengths included graduates in science and engineering, ease of getting credit (in which Malaysia was ranked first in the world), ease of protecting investors, market capitalisation as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), high-technology imports less re-imports and the percentage of total trade made up of creative goods exports.

The areas of weakness included costs of redundancy dismissals, level of domestic trademark registrations, GDP/unit of energy use, and reading, mathemathics and science results at the measurement level (15 year olds), he said.

Willimott said that WIPO worked with the Intellectual Property Corp of Malaysia (MyIPO) to help with the development of the different aspects of intellectual property (IP).

He said MyIPO has some promising initiatives in creating awareness of IP such as an IP awareness online survey, IP online filing options, customer service counter and videos to help Malaysian business owners wanting to use MyIPO's services.

On the progress of patent-filing activity, Willimott said, the latest data indicated record-level patent-filing activity via WIPO in 2013 as the number of annual international patent applications surpassed the 200,000 mark for the first time.

"The international trademark (46,829 applications in 2013) and industrial design filings (2,990 filings in 2013) were also a record.

"The 2014 usage data is expected to also be very high," he said.