Knowledge-Based Economy (KBE) deals with the use of knowledge engineering and knowledge management to produce economic benefits to an organization or a country or a region. New ideas and approaches from policy makers, managers and knowledge workers are very much helpful for the development of knowledge economy. Hence, in the KBE, learning, knowledge, research and human capital are key factors in the development of organizations, sectors, countries and regions.

In the paper, "Assessing the Knowledge Economy: GDP, Productivity and Employment Growth in EU Developed Regions", the authors, Alessandro Sterlacchini and Francesco Venturini show that the Per Capita GDP (PCGDP) growth is positively affected by both the Research and Development (R&D) intensity and the share of adults with tertiary education and report that the policy message derived from their findings seems quite straightforward for the regions experiencing a virtuous pattern of economic growth, based on increases in both productivity and employment. The growth of labor productivity has been moderately positive in manufacturing, while the employment growth has been concentrated in business services. Due to the mounting importance of services, the overall rate of productivity growth in the European Union (EU) is experiencing decay.

In the paper, "Funding Research and Educating People in a Growth Model with Increasing Population", André Grimaud and Frederic Tournemaine analyze an economy incorporating an R&D sector (producing knowledge) and a human capital sector (educating individuals), and also the population growth. They formalize interdependence between the R&D and the human capital sectors, which appear equally essential to sustain per capita long-term growth. They use a simple economic policy tool to show how to implement an optimal balanced growth path.

In the KBE, numerous corporate organizations utilize intellectual capital as their competitive advantage to create corporate value. Based on the fact that measurement of intellectual capital is a precondition for the `strategic management' of intellectual capital, V Kavida and Sivakoumar N, in their paper, "Intellectual Capital: A Strategic Management Perspective", attempt to measure the value of such intellectual capital in monetary terms, using two indirect methods, namely, Return on Capital (ROA) and Market Capitalization Method (MCM). They work on a sample of 30 companies from the BSE Healthcare Index and find that almost 60% of the market value is accounted by the intellectual capital of those companies and the value of the intellectual capital moves in a similar pattern with that of the market value.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the role of Management Control Systems (MCS) and its style of use during New Product Development (NPD) innovation. In the paper titled, "The Use of Control Systems in New Product Development Innovation: Advancing the `Help or Hinder' Debate", Chris Akroyd, Sharlene Narayan and V G Sridharan attempt to explain why MCS can be thought to hinder the NPD innovation efforts. They suggest that each NPD innovation project faces a different level of uncertainty; those projects involving incremental changes face low market and technical uncertainties, whereas those involving radical changes face both high market and technical uncertainties. They identify different types of stage-gate process models that can match with different levels of NPD innovation to determine whether MCS help or hinder NPD innovation.

Information and knowledge provide a lot of support to economic, social, cultural and all other human activities and hence knowledge is becoming a major creative force in a knowledge society. A knowledge society can be formed by people from either the same field or different fields and it needs both physical and technological infrastructure.

The major objectives of libraries in KBE is to integrate their services into the lives of people in order to simulate lifelong learning and serve the social and
self-development needs as well as economic needs of their customers. Ravi S Sharma, Sean Lim and Chia Yew Boon, in their paper, "A Vision for a Knowledge Society and Learning Nation: The Role of a National Library System", report that most information and knowledge professionals depend on an effective National Library System (NLS) to promote learning and knowledge sharing by cultivating social and relational capital as well as the well-understood structural repositories. Singapore appears to be a KBE in a perennial hurry whose lack of natural resources and small domestic market exposes it to the fiercest global competitive pressures. The paper details the role played by the National Library in creating a knowledge society and learning nation in the case of Singapore.

-- Nasina Jigeesh
Consulting Editor