Change in the competitive model: The age of Knowledge

Over the past twenty years, our society has recovered its entrepreneurial strength and reached very significant standards in terms of quality of life and socio-economic progress. This has placed it at a point of convergence with many middle parameters of the European Union.

This favourable position should not, however, keep us from realising our limitations and our relative situation. We must first and foremost assume that we are witnesses to a structural change in the economic model and the balance between different political, social and economic forces worldwide.

Along with the arrival of the new century, profound transformations are taking place in the global economy, associated to the growing business, financial, technological and cultural interdependence. The unification of the world market, the transnational expansion of the financial and industrial capital, the transformation and unification of the productive forms and the exponential development of communications are giving rise to an unprecedented globalisation process. No region or country in the world has been exempted from this process.

Changes are so radical that they are putting an end to a whole age in terms of the way states, people and national/transnational social/economic agents relate to each other. This scenario also demands that we overcome the risk of thinking that we are a phenomenon that will be exhausted with the industrial de-localisation of some major multinational companies or enterprises employing large numbers of workforce.

To face this emerging revolution, we have to take the opportunity to concentrate and specialise in the highest value added business functions. More and more the only possible specialisations are those economic activities based on the capacity to generate and apply knowledge and, particularly, those with high technological intensity based on the non-stop development of new scientific-technological fields: biosciences, nanotechnology, environmental intelligence, cognitive technologies, etc.

One of the first implications of this entire proposal is the need of a clear and courageous “scale-up” of competitiveness and promotional strategies for science and technology in our country. Our society must continue to face the challenge of this R&D vocation that was first developed twenty years ago, but with a clearly superior thrust since the production model currently desired positions knowledge and technology as the main axis of competitiveness, considering the international scientific –technological environment is now much more dynamic.