National prosperity is always created, and rarely is inherited. It grows out of the quality of education the country adapts. It grows out of the labor pool, transparency in administration and its currency’s value. Singapore ranks at number one in many indexes because imparts quality education. Education in Singapore is superior because the classes are focused on teaching the students specific problem solving skills and subjects. Another reason the education in Singapore is so excellent is simply because of the Singaporean culture. The citizens and the Government prioritize education in their national agenda.
A nation’s competitiveness depends on the capacity of its industry to innovate and upgrade which comes from knowledge. The differences in the levels of prosperity across nations depend on the amount of knowledge that society holds. This is the idea behind economic involvedness. Countries whose economic complexity is greater are excellent at collective knowledge. As a key resource, knowledge represents a factor of economic and social development. Formal, non-formal or informal education builds itself as a necessity and represents an important pillar of the knowledge society. Collective knowledge refers to the ways in which knowledge is distributed and shared among the citizens and business organizations of a country.
Knowledge Society is a term to describe societies which are economically and culturally characterised by a high degree of dependency on their potentials to create scientific and technological knowledge. Therefore, knowledge is becoming a special good in the market and a product to merchandise.
Companies achieve core competency and competitive advantages through innovation. Organizations brace up innovation in its broadest sense, including both new technologies and new ways of doing things. They perceive new basis for competing or find better means for competing the old style of functioning. Innovation can be manifested in a new product design, a new production process, a new marketing approach, supply chain and training and development. In international markets, innovations that yield competitive advantage anticipate both domestic and foreign needs. For example, as international concern for product safety has grown tremendously which some Swedish companies like Volvo, Atlas Copco, and AGA AB have succeeded by anticipating the market opportunity in this area. Innovation always involves investments in skill and knowledge; organizations can prove their core competency through patents which can protect an invention for up to 20 years.
Why do some countries grow and others do not? For instance in Japan due to its progressive educational system it ranks at number one in innovations. Japan has one of the world’s best-educated populations with 100% enrolment in compulsory grades and zero illiteracy. Japan focused on manufacturing with outsourcing limited to local small firms that became captive suppliers rather than eventual competitors. Japanese studied not only product design and machine tools creation but also precise manufacturing processes to achieve both quality and cost effectiveness. Japan sets a comprehensible, sophisticated, and actually implemented industrial strategy over decades, like the U.S, Germany, France, and England did periodically in the 19th Century. Japanese focus on shipbuilding, machine tool manufacturing, steelmaking, electronics, home appliances, consumer electronics, materials science, and industrial equipment through the sort of integrated conglomerates called keiretsu.
Keiretsu is a set of companies with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings. In the legal sense, it is a type of informal business group that loosely organizes alliances within the social world of Japan’s business community. Japanese believe in learning from everywhere. Successful economies borrow from the best and work out their own implementations, often in direct joint ventures or at least benchmarking. For example, Hero Cycles of India got into a joint venture with Honda of Japan in 1984 with an approximate equity of 16 crore, which became the world’s largest two-wheeler company in early 2001. In 2010 Honda decided to move out of the joint venture and a new company Hero MotoCorp was born.
The notion of knowledge society is not very clear. It means a new society formed as a result of the modern societal change pushed by technological innovation and institutional transformation, which is not only about technological innovations, but also about progress in human beings in terms of the emotional and intellectual growth. It is related to personal growth, creativity, experience and participation in the generating knowledge. The primary role of nations in a knowledge society is to ensure that their knowledge sources are passed on and advanced by each generation.
Knowledge society values and acknowledges the impactful role and contribution of knowledge in pursuit of socio-economic development. Few years back, a team of researchers from Harvard and MIT has discovered that a new measure based on a country’s collective knowledge can account for the enormous income differences between the nations of the world better than any other factor. Ricardo Hausmann, Cesar Hidalgo, Sebastian Bustos, Michele Coscia, Alexander Simoes and Muhammed Yildrim have written a book titled “The Atlas of Economic Complexity.” The authors say that the amount of knowledge that is required to make a product can vary enormously from one good to the next. Most modern products require more knowledge than what a single person can hold. Nobody in this world can produce a product or service just on his own. For every product a battery of workers and a battery of activities are responsible. In a larger sense Human Resource Management becomes responsible for developing an organization and the nations. I am sure that workers like to work in a firm that is much larger and more connected than an unorganized firm. That’s the reason quality of education is measured in its ability to push the frontiers of human understanding forward.
