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NCBNational Capability Benchmark
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Challenge the benchmark

Choose a score and give the benchmark a specific reason to reconsider it.

When you submit, the form attaches the current score and confidence for the country and capability you chose.

Submissions are public and start as awaiting review. A maintainer can add a response and signature after review.

Where does South Africa stand on Experimentation?

Dataset 9.3.0

This page reads one capability from the published data and is recomputed with every release. It separates what South Africa does, which makes the score, from what the country has, which sits beside the score, and places the country among the 10 countries at the nearest income. The text describes the data and recommends no policy.

What does the score rest on?

Score17.0Confidence0.53usable evidence

The Experimentation score is the equal-weight mean of the positions of six indicators on a 0 to 100 scale that every country sets together. Confidence measures the evidence behind the score and sits beside it as a second number.

The Experimentation score tracks GDP per capita at r = 0.72 across 120 countries.

Observed indicators

  • Resident patent applications

    1,804 per million people

    World Bank (IP.PAT.RESD), 2021

    Position on the scale16.1Peer median4.410 peers with a value

  • Resident trademark applications

    25,786 per million people

    World Bank (IP.TMK.RSCT), 2021

    Position on the scale6.5Peer median8.88 peers with a value

  • Resident industrial design applications

    728 per million people

    World Bank (IP.IDS.RSCT), 2021

    Position on the scale4.9Peer median2.010 peers with a value

  • New public software repositories

    417,406 per million people

    GitHub Innovation Graph (data/repositories.csv), 2026

    Position on the scale11.1Peer median19.310 peers with a value

  • Early-stage entrepreneurial activity

    14.7 % aged 18-64

    Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (APS key indicators, TEA rate), 2025

    Position on the scale27.6Peer median18.21 peers with a value

  • Tolerance of entrepreneurial failure

    50.4 % not deterred

    Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (APS key indicators, fear of failure rate), 2025

    Position on the scale35.6Peer median49.01 peers with a value

No comparable source yet, so lowering confidence: venture deals, firms through regulatory sandboxes, and university spinouts.

No condition is published beside Experimentation in this release, so the page shows only the indicators that make the score.

Where does South Africa sit among its peers?

The peers are the 10 countries at the nearest income. Income is GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, in constant international dollars, for the latest year the World Bank publishes, and distance is measured on a log scale, where half and double are equally far. No country is picked by hand, and the set changes when the data does.

In this release peer income runs from US$ 11,623 to US$ 16,079, and South Africa has US$ 13,592 (2025).

0255075100South Africa
  • Solid ring: usable or good evidence
  • Broken ring: thin evidence, opening further as confidence falls
  • The shaded band is the middle half of the set and the line inside it is the median.
  • Peru: 17.3
  • South Africa: 17.0
  • Tunisia: 14.8
  • Vietnam: 13.3
  • Sri Lanka: 11.5
  • Ecuador: 9.2
  • El Salvador: 8.2
  • Uzbekistan: 7.4
  • Indonesia: 6.9
  • Guatemala: 3.5
  • Iraq: 3.1

What separates South Africa from its peers?

South Africa scores 17 on Experimentation, above the median of the 10 scored peers, which is 8.7.

Indicators placed above the peer median on the scale: resident patent applications, resident industrial design applications, and early-stage entrepreneurial activity.

Indicators placed below the peer median on the scale: resident trademark applications, new public software repositories, and tolerance of entrepreneurial failure.

Each sentence compares one position with one median. Why a difference exists, and what to do about it, lie outside this data.

What this reading does not show

  • A national score is a coarse proxy. A capability forms in firms, cities, networks and groups below the level of the country, and a national average only describes the conditions they work in.
  • Peers share income and nothing else. Size, production structure, region and political regime are outside the rule, and a set of 10 countries can change with any revision to GDP.
  • An r reads the whole set at once and says nothing about one country alone. A correlation does not show a cause either.
  • The known artefacts that bear on Experimentation, described on the limits page: artefact A1.
  • And the ones every score in the benchmark carries: artefact A8, artefact A10.