The knowledge as an innovations attractor
The knowledge economy has been taking an important role on the socio-economics development efforts, mostly on underdeveloped economies. But let’s start on the beginning.
The knowledge economy is defined as the most advanced practice of production nowadays, in terms of the activity that achieves the greatest added value relative to the resources this consumes, which is the one closest to the mind, the imagination, as well as related to the use of information effectivelly and the intellectual capital. Nevetheless, this draw a new dilemma that has now come to the forefront of practical political economy. “Conventional industrialization, as a guarantee of economic growth and of convergence to the level of the richest economies, has stopped working”; however, these kind of new ways to irrigate the progress to the entire society through the appliance of the knowledge as a new resource of the productive processes of an economy seems to be out of reachness to most of the underdeveloped nations, and also this seems to be restricted only to the most advanced fringes within world capitalism.
“Conventional industrialization, as a guarantee of economic growth and of convergence to the level of the richest economies, has stopped working”. (Mangabeira Unger, 2019)
On the other hand, based on a heterodox perspective, the innovation process is understood as the changes in routines in order to solve problems. They are not radical but incremental changes. These routines are the result of a combination of pre-existing resources that allow the normal functioning of an organization. So, innovation is associated with a solving problem capacity, a problem that may be present or that could be going to appear; in that last sense, it is the logic of anticipation. The organizations may have the ability to anticipate the problems and that leads to creative responses and not to adaptive ones. The adaptive ones have to do with what actions the companies take when facing a problem, ex-post, looking for a way to solve that problem. The creative response is related to the anticipation capacity, ex-ante; companies may see a little further and generate a creative response that allows them to anticipate the problem or improve their situation before the crisis occurs, before falling into chaos. Also, this can be applied to the possibility and capacity of the firms to anticipate a business opportunity.
With the advancement of the new techno-economic paradigm focused on communication and information technologies, both knowledge and organizational and institutional learning are key resources to drive innovation processes both in services and in the new generation of manufacturers, which is manufacturing firms transfigured into services. In this way, new pieces of knowledge are joined and/or reconfigured to generate innovations; the learning process turns out to be a key activity in the generations of this new knowledge, both for its deterministic trajectory (path dependence) and for its irreversible accumulation in innovation processes. From this point of view, in highly competitive and disruptive environments that organizations currently find themselves in, we consider knowledge to be the most important source of competitive advantage. While the ability to absorb knowledge is crucial to develop and increase an organization’s capacities to learn -and therefore to innovate-, the diffusion of knowledge is fundamental for the productivity of companies.
With the advancement of the new techno-economic paradigm focused on communication and information technologies, both knowledge and organizational and institutional learning are key resources to drive innovation processes
From the above it is clearer that the knowledge economy has become the most advanced production practice today. Having said that, it is now more accurate to say that the growth of knowledge becomes the axis of economic activity and consequently of the innovation processes. New products or assets and new ways of designing and manufacturing them are simply the materialization, in goods and services, of our guesswork , experiments and the knowledge applied to the creative process from which they have been created.
Lastly, two questions arise around the absorption of knowledge and learning. In the first place, a further investigation in relation to the structural and institutional framework and the way in which these are, can or should be adapted. On the other hand, the question of whether the knowledge economy, the now most advanced production practice, is only confined to the most advanced fringes within world capitalism, or can be extended to developing regions. Although we believe that these topics should be covered by future works and researches, since they turn out to have a validity and imperative importance, it is outside the scope of this essay to give arguments or try to elucidate these two questions raised in this section.
Bibliography
Roberto Mangabeira Unger (2019). “The knowledge economy”.
Feng Liu , Dev K. Dutta & Kwangtae Park (2020). “From external knowledge to competitive advantage: absorptive capacity, firm performance, and the mediating role of labour productivity”.
Erik S. Reinert (1996). “The Role of Technology in the Creation of Rich and Poor Nations: Underdevelopment in a Schumpeterian System”.
Richard R. Nelson (1994). “The Co-evolution of Technology, Industrial Structure, and Supporting Institutions”.
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