With the buzzwords of knowledge-based economy and knowledge-driven economy, policy-makers, as well as journalists and management consultants, are pushing forward a vision of change that transforms the way advanced economies work. Yet little is understood about how the knowledge-based economy differs from the old, traditional economy. It is generall

As yet, little is understood about how the knowledge-based economy differs from the old, traditional economy. Digesting up-to-date, cross-disciplinary thinking, this significant volume provides an account of the transformation of advanced economies.

Knowledge management (KM) is probably the first major management trend to identify information and its management as a crucial element in the success of an organization. In order for information professionals to participate fully in KM initiatives, or to be able to take advantage of the concept to improve the effective application of their skills, both the professionals and management need a good understanding of the KM approach and the information related roles within that framework. This book focuses on the potential role of the information professional in the KM environment and, using plenty of case studies, considers: the knowledge context - creating knowledge based environments in a range of sectors powering information: the role of information skills in KM. Readership: This book will make topical reading not only for those seeking career development through KM but for all information professionals wondering exactly what it is and how it will affect their work. LIS graduates and postgraduates will also be potential readers. Published in association with TFPL Ltd TFPL Ltd have been researching KM since 1996 and have monitored developments in Europe and the USA. They have recently completed an international research project looking at the skills required for the successful implementation of knowledge management.

Based on a landmark study of over 200 of American's largest companies, this book examines how the intellectual assets of a corporation can be leveraged to create a knowledge organization.

Argues that competition is inherently destructive and that competitive behavior is culturally induced, counter-productive, and causes anxiety, selfishness, self-doubt, and poor communication.

Competition, Economic Planning, and the Knowledge Problem expands on the ideas Kirzner first discussed in Competition and Entrepreneurshipthe role of the entrepreneur and its relation to the determination of prices and the coordination of individuals plansas well as economic planning, the knowledge problem, market-process theory, and the parts played by information, knowledge and advertising. It includes a paper on F. A. Hayeks theory of market coordination and the Austrian business-cycle theoryseen now for the first time in its original English. As a whole, the volume expresses Kirzners understanding that economics cannot be separated from its human element. Competition is a rivalrous process of entrepreneurial activity in which individuals and firms discover, innovate, and outdo each other. Kirzner discusses why this dynamic view of the economy is so important to understand, particularly in the contexts of economic planning and the workings of competitive markets. Over the course of this books nineteen articles and one monograph, Kirzner also stresses another point: though knowledge is present in all economic interaction, it is also dispersed in the economy such that no individual mind can ever centralize it all. This knowledge problem implies, as Mises and Hayek have argued, the impossibility of central planning. Kirzners contribution is to show that, ultimately, it is only the free, competitive entrepreneurial process that can overcome this problem through generation of knowledge that enables the most efficient allocation of scarce resources.

This book is about how to implement creative competition within an organization. It examines the conditions under which internal competition can promote knowledge acquisition and knowledge sharing. The book describes a number of studies of sales departments in Japanese firms. Sales departments in Japanese firms were studied because internal competition is getting fiercer in these departments following the recent introduction of performance-based compensation. Exploratory case studies of ORIX Corporation and Japan Computer were conducted in order to generate research hypotheses. To gather quantitative data and test the hypotheses drawn from the case studies, a questionnaire survey of sales departments of Japanese firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange was carried out. The findings reported in the book shed new light not only on internal competition theory, but also provide new insights into the theories on knowledge creation and intra-organizational conflict.