EIU Study: Long Term Initiatives Needed for IT Industry

The Business Software Alliance, a global advocate for the software industry, ranked the United States as the world’s most competitive country in the IT sector, despite the fact that it was still to come to terms with its economy. The results were published in the 2011 edition of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s IT Industry Competitiveness Index.

According to the study, the ‘well-established IT powerhouses’ retained their rankings because of continuous investment in IT innovation that yielded rich dividends. It however cautioned these countries against complacency because the competitive arena was becoming more crowded with more developing countries starting to compete with the leaders on an equal footing.

“It is abundantly clear from this year’s IT Industry Competitiveness Index that investing in the fundamentals of technology innovation will pay huge dividends over the long term,” said Business Software Alliance President and CEO Robert Holleyman, in a press release.

The index, which benchmarks 66 countries on the basis of several criteria associated with IT development, identified the top 10 in overall rankings for 2011.

Accordingly, developing countries like Malaysia and India created quite a stir as they surged forward in the overall rankings because of robust research and increased developmental activity. China’s upward progress was hindered by its weak performance in protecting intellectual property rights.

However, the EIU study painted a different picture as far as developed countries were concerned. Canada and the United Kingdom slipped a little in the overall rankings partly because of decreased R&D and lower enrollment in science and higher education respectively.

Some countries did post strong overall gains with new levels of strength in all IT foundation areas with Finland figuring right at the top and Netherlands and Israel bringing up the top10.

Holleyman concluded that although huge investments in R&D augured rapid growth for the developing economies, they veered away from providing low-cost products and services, which developed countries tended to focus on more. This gave rise to a world with many centers of IT power.

Given the fact that the economy was beginning to look up, Holleyman recommended that government and policymakers take a long term view of IT industry development, look well ahead and invest accordingly. Failure to think long term would increase the risk of being left well behind.

In other news, the Business Software Alliance recently released detailed findings from the groundbreaking study on its official blog, BSA TechPost. Ipsos Public Affairs conducted the research for BSA by surveying approximately 15,000 PC users in 32 countries. This included 400 to 500 in-person or online interviews per country.The study finds that large majorities of computer users in the developing world regularly acquire software through illegal means -- such as buying a single license for a program and then installing it on multiple machines, or downloading programs from peer-to-peer networks -- even though they express support for intellectual property principles.