Entrepreneurship and Growth in Knowledge Economy

Of Knowledge and Knowledge Economy

If we consider the economic evolution over the ages, we can find the civilization beginning with the agriculture based economy. Gradually, it moved up to the industrial age which brought in great shift in the economy with the concepts of mass production, global trading, franchising, branding, customization and so on. With the onset of internet, came the information age, where the clients and customers had easy access to information and knowledge. So it was difficult for any entity to remain isolated from competition. Through evolution, the present age has been rightly called the Knowledge Economy which is about the organizations’ sustainable ability to utilize the readily available resources to create value for the organizations as well as for the society.

The rise in information accessibility and technology during the last decade has helped economies move from physical resources towards resources which are knowledge based. But it is not just IT which has helped economies move towards knowledge but also the organization which has adapted more innovative approach towards its gainful processes and through intellectual sprawls. It is much about innovative approaches, investment and excellence through learning and knowledge sharing which has helped in the process of globalization and leading to what we call the Knowledge Economy. And so, the Knowledge Economy is fundamentally different from the preceding Industrial Economy or the Agrarian Economy because its core value is related to bytes, not bits—in the form of customized, applied information or more specifically custom knowledge. With the dramatic increase of available knowledge resources and with almost unlimited capacity of databases (Rifkin, 2000), the critical question has become: what should be selected and what should be ignored which means majority of the modern day organizations are operating in a knowledge based economy gaining competitive advantage over each other through knowledge based resources available in common domain.