The World Economic forum (WEF) has released The Global Competitiveness Report for 2017-2018 and the report ranks different countries under 12 different pillars among them being Innovation and Technological readiness. The report looks at different metrics that are used to rank the countries with a maximum score of 7 for the best all the way down to 1, across all the pillars.
The most innovative country in the world is Switzerland, “Its capacity for innovation and the quality of its scientific research institutions,” WEF writes in a blog post, “Are just two of the factors that have enabled this small alpine country to hold onto the top spot in the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitiveness Index.” Switzerland has remained top of the overall global competitiveness ranking for six years in a row. The Global Competitive Index rates countries on 12 pillars of competitiveness.
Under the Innovation pillar, WEF looks at a country’s capacity for innovation, quality of scientific institutions, company spending on Research and Development (R&D), University-industry collaboration in R&D, Government procurement of advanced technology products, availability of scientists and engineers and the number of patent filled under the Patent Cooperation Treaty.
On innovation, Kenya ranks 37th globally, with a score of 3.8, followed closely by South Africa with a similar score but ranked 39th and Nigeria falling behind with a score of 2.8 and ranked 119th globally.
Another interesting pillar is Technological readiness, under which we have a Technological adoption subindex. Here, WEF looked at availability of latest technologies in a country, extent of business adoption of latest technologies, technology transfer through foreign direct investment, percentage of individuals using the internet, internet bandwidth and broadband internet subscriptions (mobile and fixed) to rank the countries.
Kenya ranks 41 in technological adoption with a score of 5.0, South Africa ranks 45 with a 4.9 score and Nigeria ranks 87 with a 4.3 score.
Interestingly, when it comes to the overall Global Competitiveness Index, South Africa is ahead of Kenya with a ranking of 61 and a GCI score of 4.3, Kenya ranks 91 with a 4.0 GCI score and Nigeria falls close to the bottom with a GCI score of 3.3 and ranked 125th.
If Kenya did not have Mpesa, imagine how this list would have been.
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