We are in the midst of a major transition from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy. We have talked about this coming transition since the mid-1950s when Fritz Machlup began to track shifts in our national accounts. Today, having lived through the transition, we have a much better understanding of what a knowledge economy is and how it works.
Growing Intellectual Capital
A knowledge economy is one in which intellectual capital is a primary factor of productivity and a major source of wealth. In a knowledge economy, intellectual capital is as or more valuable than financial and physical capital.
Growing intellectual capital—whether at an organization, a community or a state level—does not simply mean we need to produce and hire people who have advanced academic credentials. It means providing an environment in which everyone learns continuously, sees problems as opportunities, and collaborates to create new intellectual capital. In the knowledge economy, continuous, situational, and adaptive learning is the new normal.
This new normal is not unlike a time in our past. During World War II all sectors of the economy mobilized around a common goal—to win the war and liberate our allies. What was most striking about that time was the close collaboration among academic, public-sector, and private-sector organizations. Learning was continuous and collaborative, and everyone approached challenges with a problem-solving mentality.
After World War II each of these kinds of organizations developed distinct goals and roles, which have grown rigid over the years. There is a need to rethink how each of these kinds of organizations is transitioning to the new normal of learning and to the knowledge economy in general.
The New Normal
This new normal is shifting the traditional boundaries that defined where, when, and how we learn. Every kind of organization—including those in the public sector, private sector, and academia—needs to see itself as a learning organization. Learning is the common thread across all kinds of knowledge organizations. The new normal creates new challenges and opportunities.
What are these challenges and how can we take advantage of opportunities to ease the transition to the knowledge economy? These are big questions, but I will focus on the challenges and opportunities for academic and public sector organizations.
Challenges for Academia
The challenges this shift brings are greatest for academia. Academia has traditionally seen itself as the primary source of learning through teaching. For academia this new normal means shifting from a focus on teaching to one of learning.
While the traditional book- or resource-based learning is still important, it must be supplemented with active, adaptive, and generative learning models. Universities need to provide situational learning and real life double-loop, problem-solving opportunities for students. Continuous and ubiquitous learning opens opportunities for those who have learned how to learn, not just learned how to succeed in the education system.
Students learn how to learn by being placed in situations where they have to work with others to solve problems, and where they are able to discover their own knowledge gaps. Learning is now lifelong, continuous, and ubiquitous. Students learn how to learn by being placed in situations where they have to work with others to solve problems.
In the knowledge economy, students need to be work-ready when they graduate. They need to have a portfolio of experiences to demonstrate what they know and what they can do to prospective employers. Just having a degree is not sufficient today unless that degree conveys not only resource-based but also experiential learning.
The new normal for students has implications for faculty. Faculty must have strong academic and teaching credentials, but they also must have practical credentials and credibility. When every organization is a learning organization, academic faculty can no longer presume to have the most current or the most extensive knowledge of a topic. This means that faculty needs to be out in the real world learning from practice. It also means that academic institutions need to value this type of faculty learning.
In this new normal, faculty research needs to shift from primarily theoretical to resource-based challenges to real world application-based problems. In the new normal, universities are no longer the only source of new ideas. Discovery takes place everywhere. Traditional academic curricula need to be rethought. Curricula need to include more practical short-duration skills building courses in addition to the standard semester- or quarter-long courses. And, curricula need to be reviewed and updated on a more frequent basis.
Challenges for Public Organizations
This is a particularly challenging time for public sector organizations to think about a new normal. The cost-cutting public policy of the last 30 years has made it difficult for public-sector organizations to achieve their current goals.
Public policy continues to decimate our public sector intellectual capital through furloughs, offshoring, and a failure to restock as the Baby Boomer generation retires. Rather than reducing these stocks, we should be replenishing them to meet the demands of a knowledge economy. While academia cannot solve the big challenges, targeted collaboration may fill some gaps.
These challenges open tremendous opportunities for academia. These opportunities are hard to realize, though, because they require major changes in organizational culture and design. As we all know, cultures change slowly, and new designs are difficult to achieve in well-established institutions.
We need to rethink who can learn, and when, where, and how universities are designed to support learning. We see evidence of change in some of our leading universities that are recognizing the value and importance of providing open learning opportunities to the general public. Engaging in collaborative learning across traditional boundaries provides another opportunity.
The public sector can provide real-world, situational learning opportunities for faculty and students. Collaborative learning across public sector and academia is one small opportunity. The challenge is opening a dialog about where these opportunities exist in the public sector and finding academic institutions whose faculty and students have the learning attitudes and the appropriate skill sets to add value.
My experiences at Kent State University show what kinds of collaboration might be possible. Kent State has several online graduate programs, including a rapidly growing master of science and graduate certificate program in knowledge management. Each course in the program involves theory and practice, in the form of a real world project.
Faculties teaching these courses have real-world practical experience as well as strong academic credentials. Faculty knowledge is current; their understanding of real world challenges is deep. Faculties continue to engage with organizations in applied research, which they then take back to the classroom. Students often are mid-career professionals with strong work experience and business acumen. Students can leverage independent investigations, internships, and master's projects to design a collaborative learning experience with public-sector organizations.
The engagements enable public-sector organizations to develop proofs of concept for high-risk or high-cost projects that would otherwise be beyond their current financial reach. Students gain invaluable experience and knowledge as they translate what they're learning in class to real-world environments.
We offer three examples as support. The first case involved a team of three students with complementary skill sets who developed an organizational network analysis as a proof of concept for an organization. The analysis would have been beyond the financial reach of the organization. The students gained valuable experience in working as a team; they learned new skills from each other, added to their resumes and their references.
The second case involved the creation of a strategy for managing network drive content, a plan to automatically generate metadata to support access, and a plan to migrate content to institutional systems. Both of these cases positioned the public-sector organization to move these projects forward on a no-cost basis. Other projects in the works include designing and implementing knowledge audits, knowledge management maturity assessments, search system performance evaluations, the development of business architecture strategies, and other information management strategies.
These collaborative learning opportunities would not be possible if the public-sector organization is not open to new learning opportunities or if the academic institution did not have faculty or students who had relevant practical skills and understood the importance of situational learning. Working together we can define what the new normal means for both environments.