On the road to the knowledge economy

I’m back from a blogging hiatus, caused by a combination of less-than-positive thinking and cheating on my blog with Twitter. While I’ve been away, I’ve been thinking a lot about learning, people who learn and innovate, and how that relates to the holy grail known as the knowledge economy.

The knowledge economy appears to be the next desired stop on our way out of this recession. It’s a nice concept – transition from a world where we make widgets and produce things in a linear fashion to a world that is more open and flat, with a focus on people, how they think, how they learn, and what that means in terms of what and how they exchange.

But we’re in a mushy spot on the road to this shift, and that’s where my frustration has been over the past few months.

Why should you or I care? Because how we approach an emerging economy has huge implications for how we build our communities and who is included in that effort. How we adapt at the most local level will determine how we transition on the larger scale… I guess I believe the knowledge economy is inherently a grassroots change. (Your thoughts?)

I’m noodling through how to express this constructively, but for now, here’s what I’m chewing on – you could call these missed opportunities or manageable factors on the way to a new kind of working:

A lot of emphasis is on pathways – but what about practices?
Particularly in Michigan, new efforts have focused on increasing the number of college graduates, connecting students with internships, and other initiatives that build a knowledge workforce. What about internal culture, business models, and practices? My sense is that small businesses will be more nimble in this regard, but I wonder how large organizations are making visible shifts or assessing their readiness for new ways of working.

Some companies hire for innovation but manage for status quo.
If organizations want to embrace new ways of working and a new economy, one of the easiest things to do is hire innovators and learners and explore how they think. Sometimes cultural shifts require individual champions. But in my experience, there’s a disconnect between hiring innovators and welcoming the change they bring.

You know your company is struggling with this if they talk about new ideas and bold projects with public stakeholders but internally scoff ideas for improving process, require exhaustive rationale whenever suggesting a different approach, or fail to understand the value of learning if it can’t be directly quantified or monetized. (Maybe this is a regional issue?)

Some choose short-term production over long-term progress.
Maybe we just can’t help ourselves — maybe we’re so darned used to building cars and furniture and parts. If we can build a functional chair and cut some corners along the way, why not? A chair is still a chair, right? And any time you can make a process more efficient, you’re helping the bottom line, right?

It seems knowledge-driven work requires a new kind of logic and new definitions of what makes process and products successful. Efficiency isn’t enough anymore, and it doesn’t mean the same thing. I imagine the organizations that add value to their process and articulate this sense of savvy to customers will be the winners… even if at face value they are selling a similar “end product”: a chair, a car, a website, etc. (For example, would consumer demand for green products be the same if consumers were still only interested in end products like hand soap, detergent, and clothing? We can’t underestimate or ignore the fact that consumers are changing, too, and are already ahead of some companies in terms of this thinking.)

• Again, these are initial thoughts based on personal experiences, conversations, and reading. What has been your experience? What are the hiccups on the way to a new kind of economy, and what does this mean at the local or individual level?