Handbook on the Knowledge Economy


Book Description

This fascinating Handbook defines how knowledge contributes to social and economic life, and vice versa. It considers the five areas critical to acquiring a comprehensive understanding of the knowledge economy: the nature of the knowledge economy; social, cooperative, cultural, creative, ethical and intellectual capital; knowledge and innovation systems; policy analysis for knowledge-based economies; and knowledge management. In presenting the outcomes of an important body of research, the Handbook enables knowledge policy and management practitioners to be more systematically guided in their thinking and actions. The contributors cover a wide disciplinary spectrum in an accessible way, presenting concise, to-the-point discussions of critical concepts and practices that will enable practitioners to make effective research, managerial and policy decisions. They also highlight important new areas of concern to knowledge economies such as wisdom, ethics, language and creative economies that are largely overlooked. Distinguished by a combination of practical relevance and analytical rigour, this Handbook provides new insights into the basic mechanisms that constitute a knowledge economy and society, and will be invaluable to practitioners and academics in diverse areas of interest, including: knowledge management, innovation management, knowledge policy, social epistemology, and development studies.




Foundations of the Knowledge Economy


Book Description

This book presents new evidence concerning the influential role of context and institutions on the relations between knowledge, innovation, clusters and learning. From a truly international perspective, the expert contributors capture the most interesting and relevant aspects of knowledge economy. They explore an evolutionary explanation of how culture can play a significant role in learning and the development of skills. Presenting new data and theory developments, this insightful book reveals how changes in the dynamics of knowledge influence the circumstances under which innovation occurs. It also examines cluster development in the knowledge economy, from regional to virtual space. This volume will prove invaluable to academics and researchers who are interested in exploring new ideas surrounding the knowledge economy. Those employed in consultant firms and the public sector, where an understanding of the knowledge economy is important, will also find plenty of relevant information in this enriching compendium.




Educating for the Knowledge Economy?


Book Description

Leading scholars from the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand question whether current policies relating to knowledge, learning and assessment are consistent with the kinds of workers and skills required for the knowledge economy?




The Knowledge Capital of Nations


Book Description

A rigorous, pathbreaking analysis demonstrating that a country's prosperity is directly related in the long run to the skills of its population. In this book Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but Hanushek and Woessmann argue that message has become distorted, with politicians and researchers concentrating not on valued skills but on proxies for them. The common focus is on school attainment, although time in school provides a very misleading picture of how skills enter into development. Hanushek and Woessmann contend that the cognitive skills of the population—which they term the “knowledge capital” of a nation—are essential to long-run prosperity. Hanushek and Woessmann subject their hypotheses about the relationship between cognitive skills (as consistently measured by international student assessments) and economic growth to a series of tests, including alternate specifications, different subsets of countries, and econometric analysis of causal interpretations. They find that their main results are remarkably robust, and equally applicable to developing and developed countries. They demonstrate, for example, that the “Latin American growth puzzle” and the “East Asian miracle” can be explained by these regions' knowledge capital. Turning to the policy implications of their argument, they call for an education system that develops effective accountability, promotes choice and competition, and provides direct rewards for good performance.




Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy


Book Description

This is a major work by three international scholars at the cutting edge of new research that investigates the emerging set of complex relationships between creativity, design, research, higher education and knowledge capitalism. It highlights the role of the creative and expressive arts, of performance, of aesthetics in general, and the significant role of design as an underlying infrastructure for the creative economy. This book tracks the most recent mutation of these serial shifts - from postindustrial economy to the information economy to the digital economy to the knowledge economy to the 'creative economy' - to summarize the underlying and essential trends in knowledge capitalism and to investigate post-market notions of open source public space. The book hypothesizes that creative economy might constitute an enlargement of its predecessors that not only democratizes creativity and relativizes intellectual property law, but also emphasizes the social conditions of creative work. It documents how these profound shifts have brought to the forefront forms of knowledge production based on the commons and driven by ideas, not profitability per se; and have given rise to the notion of not just 'knowledge management' but the design of 'creative institutions' embodying new patterns of work.




Managing the Future


Book Description

In this book, leading authors explore ways in which organizationscan develop their ability to manage the future. An exploration of the ways in which organizations can developtheir ability to manage the future. Consists of ten papers written by authors from both sides ofthe Atlantic and from Asia, all of whom are distinguished scholarsin the fields of strategy or organizational learning. Addresses key questions about how organizational foresight canbe conceptualized and developed, and the extent to which it ispossible. The papers are prefaced by a foreword from Spyros Makridakisand an introduction from the editors. Helps to shape a new research agenda, and so will be ofinterest to academics, as well as to students andpractitioners.




Wisdom and Management in the Knowledge Economy


Book Description

This book reinvigorates the use of wisdom in management and work practice, promoting it as an important research topic and demonstrating how it can be applied across a number of important management areas such as knowledge innovation and strategy.




Economics of Knowledge


Book Description

With a farm of pigs as his abacus, Arthur Geisert uses elements of a search and count game to bring Roman numerals to life in this unintimidating math-concept book. First, the seven Roman numerals are equated with the correct number of piglets. Then the reader may practice counting other items—hot-air balloons, gopher holes, and more—as the remarkable adventure unfolds. (And yes, there are one thousand pigs in the etching for M!)




The Knowledge Economy


Book Description

Revolutionary account of the transformative potential of the knowledge economy Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it is the radically innovative vanguard known as the knowledge economy. In every part of the production system it remains a fringe excluding the vast majority of workers and businesses. This book explores the hidden nature of the knowledge economy and its possible futures. The confinement of the knowledge economy to these insular vanguards has become a driver of economic stagnation and inequality throughout the world. Traditional mass production has stopped working as a shortcut to economic growth. But the alternative—a deepened and socially inclusive form of the knowledge economy—continues to lie beyond reach in even the richest countries. The shape of contemporary politics on both the left and the right reflects a failure to come to terms with this dilemma and to overcome it. Unger explains the knowledge economy in the truncated and confined form that it has today and proposes the way to a knowledge economy for the many: changes not just in economic institutions but also in education, culture, and politics. Just as Smith and Marx did in their time, he uses an understanding of the most advanced practice of production to rethink both economics and the economy as a whole.




Routledge Handbook of the Economics of Knowledge


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of the Economics of Knowledge provides a comprehensive framework to integrate the advancements over the last 20 years in the analysis of technological knowledge as an economic good, and in the static and dynamic characteristics of its generation process. There is a growing consensus in the field of economics that knowledge, technological knowledge in particular, is one of the most relevant resources of wealth, yet it is one of the most difficult and complex activities to understand or even to conceptualize. The economics of knowledge is an emerging field that explores the generation, exploitation, and dissemination of technological knowledge. Technological knowledge cannot any longer be regarded as a homogenous good that stems from standardized generation processes. Quite the opposite, technological knowledge appears more and more to be a basket of heterogeneous items, resources, and even experiences. All of these sources, which are both internal and external to the firm, are complementary, as is the interplay between a bottom-up and top-down generation processes. In this context, the interactions between the public research system, private research laboratories, and various networks of learning processes, within and among firms, play a major role in the creation of technological knowledge. In this Handbook special attention is given to the relationship among technological knowledge and both upstream scientific knowledge and related downstream resources. By addressing the antecedents and consequences of technological knowledge from both an upstream and downstream perspective, this Handbook will become an indispensable tool for scholars and practitioners aiming to master the generation and the use of technological knowledge.