Home » intelligence capital index » Recent Articles:

The Nordics are among the world’s 10 smartest countries – most likely to ‘produce the next Google’

August 17, 2017 Articles, Media / Op-ed
Tom Turula 17 Aug 2017 10:48 AM [caption id="attachment_3510" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Spotify Press Photo[/caption] Sweden, Finland and Denmark are very well-positioned to foster the big ideas of tomorrow. This according to the Intelligence Capital Index (ICI), compiled by Distinguished Fellow at INSEAD, Kai L. Chan, who gauged four parameters – education, creativity, cognitive skills and attractiveness for skilled immigrants – to determine the smartest countries in the world with the best innovation potential. The ICI was published by INSEAD Innovation & Policy Initiative Sweden tops the Nordic countries at sixth place, tightly followed by Finland and Denmark on 9th and 10th spots. The top ten is otherwise populated by European and North American countries, with the exception of Australia and Singapore. Chan notes that the Nordics have “typically high scores on the aspects of attractiveness for immigrants and creativity.” The ranking pins Sweden as the world’s most creative country, followed by Finland and the U.S. “Creativity should be part and parcel of any measure of human capital. Rote learning and memorisation are fast losing value in an era increasingly relying on computers and robots,” writes Chan, who used the Global Creativity Index and countries’ ratio of R&D expenditure-to-GDP as creativity proxies. Denmark excelled with the quantity and quality of its elite education (5thand 9th in…

Lebanon ranks 100th in Intelligence Capital Index

July 14, 2017 Articles, Media / Op-ed
Countries capitalise on the knowledge economy to advance Published: 16:59 July 14, 2017 Joseph A. Kechichian, Senior Writer Beirut: Lebanon, which frequently boasts of its unique education capabilities ranked 100th with a low score of 16.9 [or simply a D] in the Intelligence Capital Index. The first Arab country on the list, the UAE, closed in at the 49th spot, followed by Qatar (60), Saudi Arabia (62), Kuwait (63), Bahrain (65), Oman (76), Jordan (80), Tunisia (85), Morocco (94), Egypt (98), and Algeria (103). Kai L. Chan, a distinguished fellow at the French-led INSEAD global business school, published the unique Intelligence Capital Index for 128 countries that aimed to gauge the ability of countries to capitalise on the knowledge economy by assessing their environments for education, creativity and talent attraction. The first five countries in the INSEAD roster were the US, UK, Germany, Australia and Singapore. Israel came in at 25, Turkey at 54 and Iran at 82. Most of issues that motivated rankings were related to education creativity and talent attraction, and while Lebanon certainly enjoyed the talent, most of its gifted innovators succeeded abroad instead of thriving in their native land. The INSEAD barometer focused on each country’s…

The world’s smartest countries

July 12, 2017 Articles, INSEAD, Media / Op-ed
Kai L. Chan, Distinguished Fellow, INSEAD Innovation & Policy Initiative | July 12, 2017 [caption id="attachment_3479" align="aligncenter" width="650"] The countries most likely to produce the next Google.[/caption] When Sergey Brin was 16 and his family had already been living in the United States for a decade, his father took him on a short trip back to Russia. It was 1990 and the Soviet Union was collapsing. By the second day of the trip, the teenager had seen enough to grasp what his life could have been. Taking his father aside, the future co-founder of Google told him in earnest: “Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.” Although Russia has since rebounded, young Brin won the citizenship lottery, having been raised in the U.S. where he had access to great schooling and an environment to nurture his brain. As a child, he received a Montessori education, known for cultivating creativity. Later he went on to study at Stanford University where he met Larry Page and together they would go on to found one of the most valuable brands in the world. Brin’s story illustrates how – given the proper environment – education and creativity can give rise to transformative innovation in the…

Intelligence Capital Index

April 27, 2017 Articles, Media / Op-ed
Article in World Monitor Magazine about the my Intelligence Capital Index. ABOUT In a global knowledge economy, education and creativity are paramount to being competitive. The Intelligence Capital Index (ICI) is a way to gauge the ability of countries to capitalise on the knowledge economy by assessing their environments for education, creativity and talent attraction. The ICI is a barometer a nation’s stock of “smarts”. It measures which nations are most likely to expand the frontier of knowledge and/or introduce the technology and innovations of the knowledge economy. Hitherto, most assessments of a country’s knowledge base have been focused on the quantity of education and, when outputs are considered, it is invariably limited to average scholastic performance (in the form of standardised test results). But this view of quantity and of averages is misguided when considering the intelligence capital of a country. In contrast to alternative measures of human capital and talent, the ICI has several distinguishing features: (i) It adjusts for quality in education outcomes; (ii) It measures the progression of cognitive skills through the human life cycle; (iii) It considers the distribution of cognitive skills with an emphasis on the top performers; and (iv) It includes an external…

New Ratings For A Knowledge Economy

February 7, 2017 Articles, Media / Op-ed
FEBRUARY 07, 2017 Author: MARK TOWNSEND Which countries lead the global knowledge economy? At least one academic suggests that current assessments of a country’s knowledge base are too narrow and reliant on averages. Historically, evaluations used a binary measure focusing on quantity of education and average scholastic performance. In research to be presented in April at INSEAD, Kai Chan, a distinguished fellow at INSEAD Abu Dhabi, argues that its brightest talents—not its average capabilities—determine the knowledge capacity of a country. He has developed the Intellectual Capital Index (ICI), which incorporates factors like creativity and the ability to attract talent. “It is a fresh perspective that recognizes that it is the right tail of the distribution, rather than the average, that expands the frontier,” he tells Global Finance. The ICI considers six aspects that influence knowledge acquisition/production: (1) quantity of education, (2) quality of education, (3) average educational skills, (4) elite educational skills, (5) creativity and complexity and (6) attractiveness and openness to talent. There are 24 indicators spanning the life cycle of talent, and according to Chan the index is a measure of a country’s stock of “smarts.” Using his formula to rank countries with the best intellectual ecosystem, Chan…

Welcome!

Archives:

Categories

These are the world’s most powerful languages:

Research Documents (pdf)

Intelligence Capital IndexPower Language IndexImmigrating into the workforceCanada's Mosaic Ceiling

Presentations (pdf):