The chapter attempts to do a comprehensive literature review on knowledge societies describing its main concepts, dimensions, aspects, and actors/players. In addition to the literature review, it proposes a framework to build knowledge societies. The framework presents seven dimensions, which have been extracted from the literature where each dimension is characterized by several aspects collected from the literature. The framework can be used by decision makers around the world as a useful tool for building robust knowledge societies in different context-specific environments.
Top1. Introduction
This chapter makes an overview of knowledge society’s concept, followed by the qualitative analysis of the research literature on this subject. Most of literature on how knowledge is created and applied to benefit society, considers knowledge as an instrument for innovation (“Towards knowledge-based economies in APEC,” 2000). The helix representation is a very common way to illustrate the main players and nature of a knowledge society. In the foundation of knowledge society’s concept, the triple helix has raised as the first one helix system (see Figure 1), with three main actors government, academia and businesses (Leydesdorff & Deakin, 2011)(Verdegem, 2011a).
Since then have emerged the quadruple helix system (see Figure 2) (Carayannis, Barth, & Campbell, 2012) (Lindberg, Danilda, & Torstensson, 2011) and quintuple helix system (Carayannis et al., 2012), which is essentially an extension of the previous one with the incorporation of environment component as a critical attribute for sustainable development (see Figure 3).
The basic Triple Helix with innovation at is core was mainly focused on economy grow through knowledge.
Figure 3. Helix Models for Knowledge Production
Quadruple Helix was significant jump towards knowledge societies by putting society at is core and stressing the need of coevolutionary processes between knowledge economy and knowledge societies. According to the Quadruple Helix, the economy structure lies in the following pillars: academia, companies, and government and talent communities. Together, with good information and communication infrastructures they create the ideal ecosystem for creativity and innovation. Governments provide laws, regulations and financial support for the definition and deployment of innovation activities. The talent communities generate new ideas and demand innovating goods and services. The concepts such as cocreation can be easily implement under this model. Figure 4, show an example how this can be putted into practice. The four actors in figure correspond directly to the Quadruple designations. This scenario is focus on the establishment of living labs for collaborative co-creation of innovative products/services.
Figure 4. Collaborative Co-creation platform for knowledge societies
The Quintuple Helix was at its core the sustainable development highlighting the importance of having codevelopment and coevolution of society, environment and culture (see Figure 3). The Quintuple Helix puts the knowledge as the most important element in development of societies, through the circulation of knowledge between social communities, the know-how increases and that drives innovation, economy prosperity and progress. The key constituents of five helices are the 1) educational system, 2) economic system, 3) environment, 4) culture and 5) political system.
The helix systems identify the overall actors involved in knowledge societies production. Another important aspect of knowledge societies is what its main dimensions for its creation are. For knowledge creation several dimensions with different roles and nature can come into place to deploy, foster and promote its acquisition such as Governance, Education, Economy, Environment, Society, Information and Communication infrastructures. On this chapter, we are going to propose an assessment framework based on seven dimensions: 1) Governance; 2) Education; 3) Economy; 4) Environment; 5) Society; 6) Information and communication infrastructure and 7) Knowledge (see Table 1).