An interesting and dynamic new tool for measuring and comparing knowledge- and technology-based entrepreneurship and emerging company activities on a global basis is the recently developed and announced Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (“GEDI”).  The GEDI was created to address and overcome several of key shortcomings of existing measures of national entrepreneurship, including the failure of indexes such as the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor to incorporate the different impacts of businesses and ranking countries based primarily on the number of businesses without regard to their success from a financial perspective or in terms of job creation and improving the local knowledge base.  In the words of the US Small Business Administration: “The GEDI captures the contextual features of entrepreneurship by focusing on three broad areas.  The first is entrepreneurial attitudes, a society’s basic attitudes toward entrepreneurship through education and social stability.  The second area of focus is entrepreneurial activity, what individuals are actually doing to improve the quality of human resources and technological efficiency.  The final area is entrepreneurial aspirations, how much of the entrepreneurial activity is being directed toward innovation, high-impact entrepreneurship, and globalization.”  The dimension of “entrepreneurial aspirations” is particularly important to the study of emerging companies across borders since it incorporates, in the words of the researchers who developed the GEDI, “the efforts of the early-stage entrepreneur to introduce new products and services, develop new production processes, penetrate foreign markets, substantially increase the number of firm employees, and finance the business with either formal or informal venture capital, or both”.  The first rankings appeared earlier this year and were highlighted in a recent article in The Economist, which noted: “America is the most enterprising big economy. The EU comes second. The rest of the world, including India and China, is far behind.”  An interesting finding was that four of the five Nordic countries were in the top ten, with Denmark leading the pack at No. 1!  We’ll be revisiting the GEDI again in the future.