ECONOMIST: Benchmarking IT industry

A report from the Economist Intelligence Unit: The means to compete - Benchmarking IT industry competitiveness

“The purpose of the IT industry competitiveness index is to compare countries in different regions of the world on the extent to which they possess the conditions necessary to support a strong IT industry. To achieve this, the Economist Intelligence Unit has built a benchmarking model which scores individual countries on the key attributes of a competitive IT sector.”

There are six categories of indicator used in the index. Among them stands the legal environment category, which includes comprehensiveness, transparency of IP legislation, adherence to treaties; enforcement of IP legislation; status of electronic signature legislation; status of national data privacy and anti-spam laws; and status of national cyber-crime laws.

Selected legal environment category scores are: United States 92.0; United Kingdom 88.5; Ireland 88.5; Germany 85.0; Japan 79.0; South Korea 66.0; China 49.0; India 48.0; Russia 38.5.

Some China-related views expressed in the report concerning IPRs:

Miller, Stanford University: “Companies complain about IP a lot but they still go there, and they protect themselves. They compartmentalise information so no one person can walk out the door with the complete story.”

Kagermann, SAP: “As China's homegrown companies begin to innovate, IP protection will be more rigorously enforced.”

Keith Collins, SAS: “They (MIT and Standford) no longer try to take an up-front value out of the IP - they take the risk of whether that IP will succeed in the marketplace, which makes it more likely that an entrepreneur can pick it up and succeed with it. Many universities have tried to drive revenue from IP, and that’s been a mistake.”