The Term originated from the book : Utopia for realists. Discussing the terms GDP, GNP, GPI und ISEW.
One way to look at this problem or to look for the data of this problem is to look at academic research. In principle the universities should research technologies and then the whole nation would benefit from it. Ideally their research should be public, to all humankind.
Open Access
The next question would be what technology does a country have and where is it been researched?
Pondering: Many of the research is funded by the state but the results are often published in magazines where you have to pay if you want to read about it.
Sci-hub and similar efforts are a start but much more is needed. We need meta data to all science papers and we need it to be free accessible as well. Something along the lines of what John Carmack here asks:
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/806241065787269120
Reproduceble Science
To measure and compare data is also necessary. There are efforts introducing the notion of "reproduceble science" to tacle this problem:
http://t-redactyl.io/blog/2016/10/a-crash-course-in-reproducible-research-in-python.html
So funding is a problem for researches like for example Here is an example from Stephen Diehl regarding programming language development: Near Future of Programming Languages - http://dev.stephendiehl.com/nearfuture.pdf
here is another example from the sage project: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company - http://wstein.org/talks/2016-06-sage-bp/bp.pdf
juan benet ycombinator interview talking about funding research with crypto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUVLuXjPAfg
Blockchain for Open Science and Knowledge Creation https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uhjb4K69l0bSx7UXYUStV_rjuPC7VGo0ERa-7xEsr58/edit
If crypto currencies and other P2P technologies enable to connect researches with the people, actual people or other P2P groups to form relationships for long term funding this would enable a great chance in developing technology for the people for society.
A notion for progress
Here is one idea that I found interesting. In the 90's there existed a game which was called Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_%28video_game%29 It was an awesome game. In that game there was a game mechanic where you would advance your civilization through selection from different choices in technology research. You have science advisors and they give you options of directions for research. Once you research a certain technology buldings and units-products become available to your civilization. Of course its a simplified view of how things work but it's good enough to convey the idea.
Now imagine if we applied the technique from the civ game to our nations research. How would that look like? In principle all research from every country happening at universities should be free and available to every one, so maybe you could even compare them in a way. So in our ideal world there would be all research published as open Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
Pondering: How many percent of all published research (world wide) is even published under open access today?
How would that technology "tree" look like? With data from all research institutions of the world?
Where to even begin with such a thing? Well there is wikipedia. And while wikipedia contains a lot of information. Its representation is rather flat. wikidata (query all research institution in the world and associated researchers) and sci-hub are certainly giving some tools to start off.
A great deal of problems of our societies ( in the US and in europe) is coming from, how do politicians deal with failure. In most cases they simple do not deal with it at all, instead choose to ignore it. To create a better society, a better government, I think we need tools like that dashboard for progress. I think we need transparency. I think a experimental society where people try our different solutions and discussion the results in a open, would improve our goverment / societies greatly.
Imagine if people say : yes I'm interested in what is researched by my country and in other countries. I want to debate progress in my country.
Open Source and Research as a substantial part of the commons , Book: Zero Marginal Cost Society
Global Database - what health issues exist what methods to compensate
Nanopatch - letter to de la zerda