UK falls behind on ‘Networked Readiness’

Added by The Editor, 3 months ago.

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The UK has slipped from the rankings of the top ten most networked economies in the world, according to the World Economic Forum.

The Networked Readiness Index (NRI), featured in the report, examines how prepared countries are to use ICT (information and communications technology) effectively on three levels. First, it looks at the general business, regulatory and infrastructure environment a country has to offer. Second, it analyses the readiness of individuals, businesses and governments to benefit from ICT. Finally, it measures their actual usage of the latest developments in ICT.

On that basis, Denmark is once again the most networked economy in the world, followed by Sweden and Switzerland. Among the top ten, the Republic of Korea (ranked ninth) and the US (ranked fourth) posted the most notable improvements, moving up 10 and three positions respectively. The UK, by contrast, fell from last year's ninth place to twelfth this year.

"The successful experience of the Nordic countries, Singapore, the US or Korea shows that a coherent government vision on the importance of ICT, coupled with an early focus on education and innovation, are key not only for spurring networked readiness, but also to lay the foundations for sustainable growth," said Irene Mia, senior economist of the Global Competitiveness Network at the World Economic Forum and co-editor of the report.

But there is plenty of reason to believe that the UK workforce of tomorrow is eager to close the gap with some of our country's more tech-savvy rivals. In last year's Realtime Generation survey of 609 UK young people aged between 13 and 17, almost half (47 per cent) have read other people's blogs (web logs) and over one-third (35 per cent have already written entries in their own blog. Half use instant messaging at least once a day and 87 per cent are members of one or more community and social-networking websites.

If the youth of the UK are ready to take on the challenge of network-readiness, then the UK government, education system and business leaders better be ready to put in place the environment and investments that this new generation expects.

The full World Economic Forum report is available at: http://www.insead.edu/v1/gitr/wef/main/home.cfm

Top twelve ranking

Denmark
Sweden
Switzerland
United States
Singapore
Finland
Netherlands
Iceland
Korea
Norway
Hong Kong SAR
United Kingdom

Comments

There are currently 3 comments about this blog.

Jeremy Taylor, 3 months ago

Gary, I think we should be concerned with regards to some areas of ICT provision. For instance, the UK is steadily falling behind in terms of broadband speeds and new ideas for delivering Internet services effectively (France has its sewers, the US has overhead cables etc.), thanks to our aging copper infrastructure.

Gary, 3 months ago

I'm not sure there is too much cause for concern here. The UK is clearly still one of the most ICT-ready places in the world, give or take a few places. It's interesting to note some of the absentees from this list, including Japan (one of the most tech-savvy nations in the world), Germany, France etc.

Victoria, 3 months ago

I don't think blame can entirely be heaped on the government; many companies are simply too wary of innovations in the enterprise that have emerged from consumer technology (IM, blogging, wikis etc.) This is an issue organisations need to wake up to – especially if they want to win in the war for talent, which will take place regardless of whether the economy slows down significantly or not.