Insead, a business school based outside Paris with campuses there and in Singapore, said the U.S. is the most innovative nation in the world when it comes to generating new ideas, adapting them quickly and profiting from them. Germany was a distant second.

The U.S. leads the second most innovative nation by almost a full point, putting it in a league of its own as far as global innovation is concerned," the Insead report said.

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