Creating Prosperity through Competitiveness Priorities
Competitiveness fosters innovation and creates a more prosperous future. Competitiveness lies at the intersection of culture, policy, geography, and talent and relies on the ability of policymakers to prioritize inclusiveness, resilience, innovation, and sustainability when developing competitiveness priorities.
On Thursday (8), at 10 am EST, the GFCC will host an online conversation on competitiveness priorities. The third in the conversation series, Building Competitiveness From Local to Global: Competitiveness Priorities, will cover how inclusiveness, innovation, resilience, and sustainability play a critical role in building innovation economies and developing competitiveness priorities.
In partnership with the Council on Competitiveness of Greece and the Delphi Economic Forum, the Building Competitiveness sessions will revisit and deepen the discussions that the GFCC started in 2021 with the Frame the Future series and provide a platform for new ideas and connections that will be further advanced during the Global Innovation Summit in November in Athens, Greece.
The “Competitiveness Priorities” session will highlight international speakers, including Zakri Abdul Hamid, the Joint Chairman of Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology; Michael Dritsas, the Head of Cabinet of the Ministry of Development and Investments in Research, Technology & Innovation; Ray Johnson, the Chief Executive Officer at Technology Innovation; Katerina Pramatari, a Founding Partner at Uni. Fund; Deborah Wince-Smith, President of the GFCC; and Roberto Alvarez (moderator), Executive Director of the GFCC.
Inclusiveness in the Digital Age
Including more people and embracing diversity in an innovation economy will drive new opportunities and boost value creation. The move to a digital and carbon-neutral economy will demand proactive measures that support all demographics and people from all walks of life, offering accessible and affordable learning opportunities. Because of this, inclusiveness must be a core pillar of a nation’s competitiveness priorities.
As nations transition to knowledge-based economies, talent has become one of the world’s most valuable resources and a hallmark of competitive countries and organizations. There is increased concern that without accessible and inclusive training that promotes core skills, mainly digital and STEM skills, societies will experience growing polarization and inequality.
Including more demographics, like senior citizens and impoverished populations, is an opportunity for governments, industries, and academia to reduce barriers to entry and make a positive difference in their communities and organizations. Cities and regions are critical to addressing inclusion since many national policies relating to tax, trade, and competition don’t account for the differences in different areas. Locally, inclusion actors, like community development organizations and social service agencies, can work together with growth actors, like employers, economic development groups, and business leadership groups, to create jobs, promote economic growth, attract businesses, provide skills, and distribute information to people in a community.
Inclusive regional economies can maximize the talent and entrepreneurial skills on which economic growth and productivity depend. Additionally, economies that extend opportunities to all maximize their productive potential and minimize the fiscal and social costs of exclusion. Inequality of opportunity provokes hostilities that fray social and political cohesion and good governance, which affects economic growth.
Resilience
Investing in resilience as a competitive advantage can enable businesses, higher education, and the public sector to recover quickly from crises. Most recently, the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic accentuated the importance of developing resilience capabilities to deal with other unexpected events, such as seismic and climate disasters or even a new pandemic.
In areas prone to natural disasters, investments in preparedness, impact mitigation, and adaptation policies must become a priority. A move from disaster management, which is a humanitarian response after a crisis, to disaster preparedness is crucial to prevent human and material losses and alleviate the impacts of disasters. As preparedness and resilience rise, so too does competitiveness.
Understanding the mechanisms that have helped humanity adapt and recover in periods of hardship can better prepare our societies for the future and accelerate innovation. In line with this, the GFCC, in partnership with Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), created the Innovating Out of Crisis initiative. It aims to deepen understanding and develop recommended actions to tackle crises and build resilience worldwide.
Innovation
Innovation is a social process that requires the engagement of businesses, researchers, government, civil society, and entrepreneurs, as well as the circulation of resources. Creating and growing innovation ecosystems depends on cross-sector collaboration and strong leadership.
Harboring an innovation network is all about involving the right people. It is not about finding the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates but about building a management team, cultivating a network of people, and educating as many people as possible. Within a company, this means having strong leaders and a leadership team, giving opportunities for innovative ideas to be shared and spread, and offering educational opportunities for all. Within a larger community, this translates into government leaders being innovation-minded, collaborating between industry, government, and academia, and reskilling and upskilling chances for all demographics.
In many parts of the world, transforming research into innovative products is a bottleneck in driving innovation. Some main barriers to innovation include rigidity, inflexibility, static processes, and bureaucracy. To combat these barriers, frameworks, processes, and organizational structures need to be modernized with the purpose of driving innovation and connecting research enterprises with the economy. As innovation infrastructure is put into place at both the national and local levels, knowledge translation becomes much more doable.
Sustainability
Sustainable innovation involves making intentional changes to a company’s products, services, or processes to generate long-term social and environmental benefits while creating economic profits. Sustainable innovation understands that there is great economic value in preserving ecosystems, natural resources, biodiversity, cultures, and communities around the world.
Implementing sustainable innovation can provide new opportunities and motives to innovate. Through sustainable innovation, new products or services directly contribute to achieving sustainability. This benefits all parts of the economy because sustainability drives new business opportunities in domains such as clean technologies.
One opportunity for developing sustainable innovation is materials technology. Semiconductors, fuel, construction materials (steel, concrete, lights, windows, etc.), nanotechnology, and many more are opportunities for investment and innovation that could make a huge difference in sustainability efforts. Biobutanol, a recent innovation in fuel, counter-ion insertion, a discovery allowing more materials to be used in batteries, sustainable semiconductors, and carbon capture technologies are all among recent developments in materials science that are paving the way for a more sustainable future.
Join Us
A fast-changing global scenario poses new challenges to designing and implementing competitiveness strategies. Translating inclusiveness, resilience, sustainability, and innovation into government and business strategies should be a priority to advance competitiveness across the globe. Join us on September 8 as we answer what should be the priorities for competitiveness strategies today and in the future and what is needed to make competitiveness strategies adaptive. Register here.
