Thanks to Jochen Robes for pointing me to the work foundation’s report on “Defining the knowledge economy“(PDF). While this is more of a generic paper that tries to come to a definition what a knowledge economy (t d f) is - by digging through piles of statistics and reports - there are some interesting statements that relate more to my interests and the entire issue of knowledge worker (t d f)s, innovation, information technology, knowledge sharing and, I dare to say, in the end social software (t d f). Eventually I becomes clear that if you want to encourage productivity (t d f) and innovation (t d f) throughout all economic, cultural and social sectors you will need to rely upon the people. And to leverage that human core activity and value on a global scale you will need information technology and the proper facilitation (t d f).
Some quotations from the report that contains some mechanistic views on the microphysics (t d f) of society.
Rather appalling:
Put more prosaically, we can say the knowledge economy is what you get when firms bring together powerful computers and well-educated minds to create wealth.
Next to renewable energy renewable employees.
Perhaps the most important property is that knowledge is the ultimate economic renewable - the stock of knowledge is not depleted by use. Indeed, the value of knowledge to an economy comes from sharing with others.
Finally: wanted to hear that.
A clear distinctive feature is the central role of the use of new information and technologies in allowing knowledge and information to be used in ways that underpin the knowledge economy concept.
But nonetheless: Some of the key feature of firms of the knowledge economy were:
-The knowledge economy consists of innovating organisations using new technologies to introduce process, organisational and presentational innovation
- Knowledge economy organisations reorganise work to allow them to handle, store and share information through knowledge management practices
Bright future for us:
Over the past decade, the share of knowledge workers has grown in almost every OECD (t d f) economy for which comparable figures are available.
The - for me - most compelling part of the report dealt with an innovative catalogue of criteria for describing the human skill set (of the workforce) of the knowledge economy:
- Expert thinking
- complex communications and judgement skills (t d f) (outward and inward)
The issue of organizational innovation shows up in the final parts of the report as “softer innovation”. In other terms knowledge-management is understood as a driver of further steps towards the knowledge economy (whatever that accurately is) and therefore innovation and productivity gains (knowledge is supposed to be abundant) are at hand. The OECD - The Significance of Knowledge Management in the Business Sector, 2004 (PDF) states four key KM practices (that lead, thats what the suggest, to innovation and productivity ‘tough that is more of an assumption than certainty):
- creating a knowledge sharing (t d f) culture
- incentives policy to retain employees
- alliances for acquiring knowledge
- written knowledge management policy
These “softer” innovations may be a key distinctive feature of the knowledge economy, especially around the introduction of knowledge management practices. Not all of the competencies required for the knowledge economy are new - the soft-skills such as leadership, ability to work in teams, learning to learn, and communication and analytical skills have been a feature of the workforce for centuries. What is new - apart from specific IT skills - is the emergence of knowledge management skills based on making effective use of the ICT (t d f) technologies to analyse, process and share information and knowledge among knowledge workers.
<=Finally: Enterprise Social Software
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Tags: Business, Innovation, Knowledge-Management, Research, Social Software
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