Story on the KAM wins third place in Babson Knowledge Management Competition

Earlier this year, the Executive Education program at Babson College organized a knowledge management story telling contest: "Improving Content Returns on Investment". The competition involved submitting best practice descriptions of how organizations create value from external information, that is, external to the organization, which drive business results.

Link to the contest information (PDF, 35Kb)



Full Story

With the spread of modern and efficient information and communication technologies, the world economy has become more competitive as well as interdependent.  As such, economic survival made it essential to have knowledge creation and use play a focal point in long-term developmental strategies. In other words, it is critical for countries make the transition to become a Knowledge Economy.    

The World Bank Institute’s Knowledge for Development (K4D) Program was formed with the objective of assisting countries in developing policies and making investments that would enable them to become a knowledge economy – an economy in which knowledge is the key engine of economic growth.  The Program’s knowledge economy approach focuses on four key fields or pillars of knowledge for economic development: economic and institutional regime (environment for knowledge use), education and training (formal assimilation of knowledge), innovation (generation of new knowledge) and the information infrastructure (dissemination of knowledge).

To facilitate the transition process to the Knowledge Economy, K4D has developed the Knowledge Assessment Methodology (KAM - www.worldbank.org/wbi/kam).  The KAM is a user-friendly Internet-based tool that provides benchmarking assessments of countries’ and regions’ readiness for the knowledge economy.  It is designed to help client countries understand their strengths and weaknesses by enabling them to easily compare themselves with neighbors, competitors, or other countries that they may wish to emulate.  The KAM is therefore useful for identifying problems and opportunities that a country may face, and where it may need to focus policy attention or future investments, with respect to making the transition to the knowledge economy. 

Comparisons in the KAM are made on the basis of 81 structural and qualitative variables that serve as proxies for the four knowledge economy pillars.  Currently, there are 132 countries and 9 regional groupings available in the KAM.  Apart from World Bank datasets, such as the World Development Indicators and the Doing Business reports, the KAM also uses external data sources, such as the World Competitiveness Report from the World Economic Forum, and the Index of Economic Freedom from Freedom House (please visit the KAM variables page for details). 

The data are continuously updated and the country coverage is expanded whenever possible.  Because the 81 variables that are contained in the KAM span over different ranges of values, all variables are normalized from 0 (weakest) to 10 (strongest) and the 132 countries are ranked on an ordinal scale.  The comparisons are presented in a variety of charts and figures that visibly highlight similarities and differences, strengths and weaknesses across countries (See example on China and India).

Given its ease of use, transparency, accessibility over the Internet, the KAM has been widely used by government officials, policy makers, researchers, representatives of civil society, and the private sector. The KAM has been instrumental in facilitating policy dialogue with country government officials. Because of the easily understood figures and charts illustrating the most recent data, government officials are able to almost immediately see how their countries fair against the rest of the world and identify urgent issues that need to be resolved if they are to compete on the global economy. This opens the door to discussions with World Bank client countries on collaborative projects that would spur economic growth.

This story was written by Derek H. C. Chen, Economist, The Knowledge for Development Program, WBI