Wednesday 2 December 2015

Is KM maturity linked to GDP?

If KM maturity is linked to economic development, then we should see a link between GDP per capita and the number of knowledge managers per capita, right?  If we do however, it is quite a weak one.



In this blog post I looked at some of the potential influences on KM maturity (as measured by the number of knowledge managers per head of country population).  This led Martin Chen to comment as follows:

In my opinion, KM maturity may depend on their economic development. More developed countries have more KM maturity and mostly they have high individualism and lower power distance (except Japan I can think of, else countries more?)

I thought I would test Martin's suggestion.

The plot above shows the countries plotted on the X axis by their ranking in terms of Knowledge Managers per head (actually Knowledge Managers on linked in per total country population on Linkedin), and on the Y axis by their ranking for GDP per capita (taken from the 2014 IMF figures here). If there were a perfect link between these two figures, the plot above would show all the dots in a straight line.

It doesn't.

There is a huge amount of scatter on the plot above. You can see a weak correlation, but it is not as strong a correlation as that with power distance and individuality as shown below.   I think we can conclude that the correlation between KM and GDP shown by these figures is a weak one.  However we do not have every country in the world on this graph, so there is more data which could be added at a later stage.



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