After another thought-provoking and enlightening talk with Leif over Skype on Friday, Alliz and I worked on his recommendations, to interesting results.

Firstly, we discovered Prof Pirjo Ståhle and the work done on dynamic national IC, in particular relating the effects of IC indicators on national wealth. At the end of the day, innovation doesn't make a difference if it doesn't translate into some concrete value, and for countries, this means GDP. As such, Alliz and I are supplementing our analysis with the link between our IC elements of HC, MC, PC and RC to FC using Ståhle and Bounfour's methodology, and in so doing, seeing how they relate to Kao's innovation systems. We're in the midst of seeking clarity relating to the details of the methodology, but so far, results have been interesting.

A key point raised by Ståhle and Bounfour is that IC elements must be examined in context of the countries' economic environments, with different IC elements playing a more important role for developing vs developed countries. This would have implications on the choice of innovation model - that perhaps, certain innovation models may be more suited for certain types of countries, and as these countries develop economically, their adoption of innovation model would change as well. Time to think about systems dynamics - the IC elements are interrelated in a non-linear way. When one IC element grows, how are the rest affected?

Secondly, we've been very intrigued as well by Finland's Committee for the Future (CFF), which, as a committee that is part of Finland's Parliament, is a clear mandate by the nation's leaders on the need to keep Finland's future forever in mind, ie the innovation and renewal dimensions of IC. There has been a number of recommendations put forth by the CFF, but the question for us is, how have these recommendations translated into concrete implementation?

At the moment, there are more questions than answers, but isn't this part of the journey? Perhaps the aim at the end isn't to have the solutions to everything wrapped in a neat little package, but instead to open the box and to ask the right questions, and ask for the world's help in filling the box with the answers.