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U.S. Innovation Scorecard

The 2025 Scorecard evaluates all 50 U.S. states across 11 distinct categories. This year, we introduced four new categories, reflecting the expanding foundations required for innovation.
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Overview

The 2025 Scorecard evaluates all 50 U.S. states across 11 distinct categories. This year, we introduced four new categories, reflecting the expanding foundations required for innovation. These new categories complement the seven categories carried over from the 2023 Scorecard, underscoring our intent to assess how states have continued to develop in key areas.

Methodology

This year, the four new categories offer a diverse range of insights into technological innovation. In Grid Preparedness, we measure a state’s energy demand in comparison to its energy supply, as well as year-on-year changes to average electricity rates.

The addition of Blockchain is an exciting new category for the 2025 Scorecard, which assesses state legislation on policies towards blockchain technologies, including cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens, and their treatment of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

In Data Privacy, numerous indicators assess businesses’ ability to innovate and compete without compromising transparency, sensitive data protections or legal clarity. While in Manufacturing, we analyze a state’s total number of manufacturers, its manufacturing percentage of GDP, and how it is attracting new manufacturing talent.

As in previous years, we consider the presence of telehealth reimbursement, tort reform, and the level of various corporate and individual income taxes as measures of innovation.

We also look at infrastructure factors, analyzing a state’s access and quality of their broadband networks. A key category once again relates to Entrepreneurial and Small Business Activity. This is a critical category, which evaluates a number of data points measuring how easy it is to start a business, as well as the amount of venture capital investment per capita in a given state.

For all of these categories, we use the latest available data to ascertain levels of innovation spanning across 23 different indicators.

Scorecard Rankings

  • Innovation Champions

    The 2025 Innovation Champions are the highest-scoring states in the country, with strong foundations for technological innovation. They exhibit particular willingness and readiness to embrace technological change. States with the top ranking in our Scorecard achieve high scores in numerous cross-cutting thematic areas, which include infrastructure, new systems adoption, legislation, and human capital.

  • Innovation Leaders

    The 13 Innovation Leaders received high scores across several of the Scorecard’s 11 categories, but fell short in a few areas. Nevertheless, these states generally had good data privacy laws, skilled workforces, and solid levels of infrastructure.

  • Innovation Adopters

    The 12 Innovation Adopters received high scores in some categories, but ultimately fell short in several others. Mobility and Blockchain tended to be moderate for most states, while there were mixed results for new jobs and investment, as well as the scale of personal and private taxes across each individual state.

  • Modest Innovators

    The number of Modest Innovators rose from seven in 2023 to 13 in 2025. Amidst a competitive landscape, some of these states had lower results for Taxes and Manufacturing. They also tended to score lower in Blockchain and had mixed results in Grid Preparedness. Despite this, most had relatively good Telehealth and Tort Reform scores.