The Knowledge Society and Entrepreneurship Within the Higher Education Institutions in Mexico

Introduction

The term “knowledge society” was first used in the United States of America and in the European Union (Breton, 2005). These countries were pioneers in evolving from an information society into a knowledge-based society using the technoscience as the tool to produce and disseminate information.

Knowledge is managed through the intellectual capital: acquired knowledge, competencies and aptitudes. It is obtained by means of training and education within the Higher Education Institutions (HEI), which are a key element to support the knowledge society, as they are equipped to produce, transmit, disseminate, and build upon knowledge.

According to Roca (2010), intellectual capital “is the combination of resources and human, organizational activities, and the relationships within an organization. Including knowledge, capabilities, experiences and employees’ abilities, R&D, organizational practices, processes, systems, data bases, and the company’s intellectual property rights; and all resources linked to the society’s external relationships. This mélange of resources and intangible activities allows an organization to transform a mix of material, financial and human resources into a system capable of creating value to the stakeholders. The intangible, to become part of the intellectual capital, should be part of the internal organization”.

Knowledge has been an implicit part (Dinu, 2005) of all social organizations, it facilitates progress through the discovery of new technology and techniques to perform activities difficult to replicate by competitors. The knowledge society is formed when an economy and its activities take awareness, including knowledge, as part of a strategy, favoring the intellectual capital and all it represents, leading to a new development adaptation resulting in the Forth Industrial Revolution. To accomplish this, knowledge management “is one of many components of good management in the knowledge-based society” (Adhikari, 2010).

According to Adhikari’s work (2010) the responsibility to produce new knowledge, to train, and to transfer experience to all the society components, as well as to manage knowledge (intellectual capital and technology) belongs to the Higher Education Institutions.

The same author explains that there are two types of knowledge: the explicit and the tacit. The former is expressed in numbers and words and is easy to transmit; the latter includes intuitions and hunches, acquired skills and ‘know-how’, that can be more difficult to communicate. The universities maintain a responsibility towards the society, for which they need to:

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  Have long term goals promoting the critical reasoning and diversity of thought through education and research;

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  Promote the role of university autonomy in research to guarantee academic freedom, high quality teaching, improvement of abilities, and transmission and dissemination of knowledge;

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  Consolidate alliances with other stakeholders;

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  Strengthen local and regional bonds in betterment of society (European University Association, 2003).

According to the EUA, the universities in Europe are essential to achieve a knowledge-based continent, captured in the ‘Lisbon Strategy’, seeking to make their society “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion” (European Commitee of the Regions, 2018).

Thus, these institutions play a key role in the development of a society, forming quality intellectual capital by educating students, who are a key factor in knowledge production. In addition, they are sources of motivation for the learners to take advantage of this knowledge and increase the entrepreneurship index based on intellectual capital with a direct and positive impact in the society (Adhikari, 2010) using new technologies, ideas, and techniques to obtain an economic growth in a society.