International Patenting and Technology Transfer of Ukraine in the Architecture of Innovative Competitiveness

The article measures Ukraine’s innovation capacity by integrating two empirical streams: trajectories in leading global composite indices of innovation and competitiveness (including the Global Innovation Index, the Global Sustainable Competitiveness Index, the Global Talent Competitiveness Index and the Summary Innovation Index) for 2015–2023, and national intellectual property statistics for 2020–2024. The unified evidence base is used to characterise the configuration of the national science and technology system along several dimensions: persistence of structural constraints captured by index dynamics; contraction of the domestic field of intellectual property registrations; sustained dominance of non resident applicants for inventions; very low intensity of international patenting under the PCT procedure in a regional comparison; and a marked concentration of protection titles generated within higher education institutions. The analysis also operationalises the phenomenon of patent migration as a measurable leakage channel and documents its sectoral focus, showing how competitive Ukrainian inventions are protected abroad without prior national filing and subsequently return embedded in imported innovation intensive products. Taken together, these results reveal weak embeddedness of Ukraine’s actors in cross border technology transfer, fragmented intellectual property governance, insufficient coupling between academic knowledge production and market appropriation mechanisms, and resident/non resident asymmetries that structure the domestic patent landscape to the advantage of external innovators. Improvements observed in individual indices during the most recent year are interpreted through the lens of this consolidated diagnostic picture and are read as signals of adaptive responses under extreme conditions rather than evidence of a completed structural turnaround. The dataset employed encompasses aggregated counts of applications and registrations by type of right, resident/ non resident shares, international filings, and cross country benchmarks, which together provide a transparent and reproducible view of how international patenting behaviour, domestic institutional design and index based positioning co shape Ukraine’s current level of innovation competitiveness.