Competitiveness in Technology and Innovation: How to Keep On?

Digital technology in general and information and communication technologies (ICT) in particular have proven to be critically important as key enabler of socioeconomic progress and development, enhancing productivity and economic growth, bringing prosperity in many ways. Digital technology is increasingly revolutionizing production and business processes, access to markets and information sources together with social interactions. We call it The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Innovation is the single most important engine of long-term competitiveness. The growing importance and the ability of companies, institutions and countries to innovate, have far-reaching implications for their strategy. The critical questions is what policymakers, business leaders, scholars, and entrepreneurs can do, either separately or acting together, to catalyze both public and private sector innovation environment (and hence grow and increase their competitiveness) and improve innovation capacity of their economies. Competitiveness is fundamental for sustainable prosperity of a nation. Economies that are more competitive are able to produce higher levels of income for their citizens. Country that is more competitive is likely to grow faster than the others over the medium to long run. The central challenge for policymakers is to create the market conditions for both companies and employees to upgrade their productivity by absorbing digital technology and innovation momentum while maintaining reasonable costs of doing business and living in the country. Benchmarking a country's competitiveness in technology and innovation remains challenging for a number and variety of dynamically changing influencing factors. Numerous inconsistent and incomparable reports and indexes, as well as of the quality and availability of statistical and real market data do not help either. Therefore, the World Economic Forum, the key source of competitiveness data and analysis, is set to significantly reform and change the way they calculate and measure Global Competitiveness Index while national economies are coping with the momentum of The Forth Industrial Revolution.