Digital_Ranking_Report_2021

Figure 3 : World Digital Competitiveness Ranking 2021 – Overall Ranking Top gainers 2017-2021

2.

Overall Trends

Digital competitiveness implies the central role of new technologies in transforming governments’ and businesses’ process as well as how society interacts. Digital competitiveness thus reflects the adoption of new technologies in providing solutions that lead to long- term value creation. Such solutions may be, for example, the development of an innovative process that enables businesses to improve their services to customers. Value creation, in the latter example, may emerge from an organization’s better understanding of its customers’ needs and/or of its products’ value in the eyes of customers. In any case, value creation brings long-term benefits to all stakeholders. The disruptive pandemic conditions of the last year and a half have forced many enterprises to undergo a shift in their business models. Such a pivot has required them to exhibit flexibility and speed in their responses to change and to new opportunities, and has led to a transformation of those organizations’ relationships with their customers/clients. In this context, readiness – particularly the level of societal adaptiveness and business agility – has been of paramount significance. Readiness, importantly, partly depends on the effectiveness of talent management and the production and acquisition of knowledge within an ecosystem that is conducive to innovation. The 2021 WDCR, indeed, highlights the prominence of readiness, talent and knowledge. In this year’s results, we identify three overall trends:

• Countries in the top positions of the ranking foster the continuous development of a

knowledge-intensive economy that is able to explore, adopt, and produce digital technologies at scale, innovating the way in which businesses and government operate and their interactions with society

• More specifically, to different degrees, leading economies sustain their digital competitiveness through their performance in future readiness particularly by remaining adaptive and agile • Their digital competitiveness also benefits from strong performances in talent and training and education As the next section highlights, these characteristics make leading economies resilient to short-term external shocks like the recent Covid-19 pandemic.

20

IMD WORLD DI G I TAL COMPET I T I VENESS RANK ING 2021