New Digital Competitiveness Report shows need for action in Switzerland

Now in its fifth year, the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking, produced by the IMD World Competitiveness Center, measures the capacity and readiness of 64 economies to adopt and explore digital technologies as a key driver for economic transformation in business, government and wider society.

The USA remains at the top of the 2021 IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking followed by Hong Kong and Sweden. The main trend highlighted by this year’s edition of the WDCR is that Eastern Asian economies continue their (persistent) rise up the digital competitiveness ladder. This, despite the firm lead of the USA at the top of the ranking and the continuous domination of most of the top 10 positions by Western European countries.

Switzerland ranks 6th behind the top three countries and Denmark and Singapore. At a media conference organised by digitalswitzerland to mark the launch of the Swiss Digital Day, Arturo Bris presented the results of the report and explained the three core challenges that the data indicate for Switzerland.

Key challenges for Switzerland

Bris mentioned the speed and agility of digital transformation as the first challenge. Switzerland is undergoing a transformation, but other countries are changing faster. For example, little use is made of big data and analytics in Switzerland. Switzerland ranks only 23rd regarding this criterion.

Switzerland tops the ranking regarding the factor knowledge which includes the sub-factors talent, training and education and scientific concentration. Despite the good performance, Bris also sees a challenge in this area. The challenge is to maintain the attractiveness for talents.

The third challenge, the lack of capital, is particularly relevant for start-ups. A particular weakness here is that Switzerland has only a few older, large ICT companies. In the IT & media stock market capitalisation criterion, it is only in 44th place. But the performance in the venture capital criterion also shows potential for improvement. Here, Switzerland is in 11th place.

(Press release / SK)