At our lunch on Friday, Peter Gloor also introduced me to the knowledge management assessment work that the World Bank is doing. The following text is mostly taken from various parts of their site to summarize the work.
World Bank Insitute's Knowledge for Development (K4D) program helps developing countries make more effective use of knowledge for their overall economic and social development. The K4D program provides knowledge assessment and policy development services, capacity building and skills enhancement services. The program works with clients to develop concrete 'knowledge' strategies that can be implemented 'on the ground'.
As part of its toolkit, the K4D program uses a knowledge assessment methodology (KAM) that helps to benchmark how an economy compares with its neighbors, competitors, or others it wishes to emulate. The KAM is designed to help client countries understand their strengths and weaknesses in making the transition to the knowledge economy.
In the Basic Scorecard, three variables are used as proxies to describe each of the four Knowledge Economy (KE) pillars: Economic Incentive and Institutional Regime, Education, Innovation, and Information Communications & Technology, plus two variables that describe economic and social performance: Annual GDP and a Human Development Index. Two versions have been developed: The default weighted Basic Scorecard version, in which the three Innovation variables are weighted by population, and the unweighted Basic Scorecard version in which the same three Innovation variables are presented in terms of absolute values.
You can try many combinations of measures and countries to look at how the World Bank Scorecard measures the use of knowledge to support economic and social development. In the weighted mode, Sweden is ranked first in the Knowledge Economy Index followed by four other Nordic countries before the US shows up at sixth. In the unweighted mode, Sweden is still ranked first but the US moves up to second.
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