However, this radical development does not take place without victimizing some elements. The major loser in this venture is the cumulative culture and expertise of peoples, an enormous knowledge capital, which is being monopolized by industrial giants as part of their cultural occupation practices. Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are sending their experts offshore to benefit from the wisdom and know-how of native groups in Australia and Papua New Guinea, and lay bare all the secrets of nature and the inherited medical expertise that the natives have deposited in their cultural storage throughout the centuries. Later, the companies acquire legal monopoly of this expertise in the form of Trade Marks, thus denying natives their right to profit from their natural resources for the loss of their intellectual properties incurred in this turn of events..

Dimensional communications have also helped accelerate the pace of globalization. Up until quite recently, international trade used to account for 28% of the global GDP. However, the percentage has increased to 47% since 2000, noting that multinational corporations are responsible for 30% to 40% of the global trade.

Innovation and Renewal

Innovation is a key factor in realizing economic development and boosting productivity. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lucid correlation between knowledge and innovation. What is more, the link between the seminal effort and the realized outcome cannot be explored directly. The prevailing trend suggests innovation is a process involving a variety of multi-faceted factors that differ in their implication, such as the adopted policies, the corporate structure and managerial culture, the amount spent on research and development, the market structure and the nature of goods.

The intricate and changeable structure of innovation factors, which is a trait common to knowledge as well, makes the measurement of innovation arduous. Traditionally, technical progress and innovation used to be calculated after eliminating the other factors implicated in the process. However, the problem is that some basic elements in the innovation process such as the organizational structures and the human capital are intangible and hard to measure. Furthermore, the indicators used to estimate innovation are diverse and the most prominent of which, the research and development factor, is often deemed tantamount to innovation itself. However, the presentation of evidence as to the influence of this factor remains difficult to achieve. Besides, there remains no simple and clear relation between research and development on the one hand and the GDP on the other, despite the manifestation of certain results such as the evident social revenues.

Although industrial countries owe 60% to 70% of their economy to the service sector, innovation in this sector is not any easier to measure. The role of science as a major innovation resource has clearly been growing in recent times and we are no longer allowed to look at the results of the scientific, technological and innovative stimuli from one straight angle. Instead, we should approach the situation from different angles, using an all-embracing perspective.

The OECD has adopted a triangular approach to define the importance of economic regeneration. This approach includes first and foremost the generation of new knowledge, then the determination of industry-science linkages and finally the industrial innovation and the level and prevalence of technology.

What we mean by industrial regeneration is the research funded by the business sector with its percentage of the GDP, the number of researchers working in the sector and their ratio to a certain number of employees (set by the OECD at 10 000), as well as the number of patents and their proportion to 1 million people and the percentage of companies laying out newer or better products and contexts. Here, it is worthwhile noting that patents are a key indicator of the knowledge economy.

The OECD summarizes the role of knowledge management as follows:

“Find a common culture of knowledge, adopt a policy of incentives to urge users to embrace knowledge, forge links and alliances to obtain knowledge and maintain an official and non-verbal policy to manage knowledge.”