PROFESSIONAL PERSPECTIVES

Professional Perspectives



Professional Perspectives

Introduction

I live in the 21st century which is the age of creativity and innovation. The strong process of technological innovation in advanced economies has experienced in recent years, together with the effects of economic globalization and changing consumption patterns of households, defined a new economy, characterized by incorporation progressive information and knowledge on the structure of value added, which allows us to define this new situation and the knowledge economy. Advances in economics from this perspective have focused on studying the economic reality of the core of the knowledge economy, i.e. the information industry, also the effects, both microeconomic and macroeconomic, which has the knowledge economy on operators and key economic variables.

Discussion

According to the Nomura Institute of Japan, there are four stages of economic activities, agricultural age, industrial age, information age and creative age. The first age was agricultural age where, farmers possessed the set of skills and knowledge to cultivate land and part of the primary sector dedicated to it. All economic activities covered by this sector based on the exploitation of the earth causes favoured by the action of man: food plants such as cereals, fruits, vegetables, pastures and cultivated fodder, fibres used for textiles; energy crops, etc. (Mokyr, 2002). This activity was of great strategic importance as the foundation for self-development and wealth of nations for it generated the major amount of the nation's revenue.

The second age was the industrial age, which began with the Industrial revolution. The industrial revolution was a historical period between the second half of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, in which Britain first and the rest of continental Europe later suffers the largest set of transformations socio economic, technological and culture in the history of mankind, from the Neolithic.

The economy based on manual labour replaced by one dominated by industry and manufacturing. The revolution began with the mechanization of the textile industries and the development of the processes of iron. The expansion of trade encouraged, by the improvement of transport routes and later by the birth of the railway. The most important technological innovations were the steam engine and called Spinning Jenny, a powerful machine related to the textile industry. These new machines favoured huge increases in production capacity. The production and development of new models of machinery in the first two decades of the nineteenth century facilitated manufacturing in other industries also increased its production.

The third age was information age; the Information Age is the name given to the period roughly follows the space age and precedes the knowledge economy and linked to information technology and communication (Feinstein, 2006). The information age is a term applied to the period in which the movement of information became faster than physical movement, and first used from 1990, coined by the sociologist Manuel Castells.

Under conventional economic theory, the Information Age also refers to the era in which the information was a critical resource, and search and capture a competitive advantage. Microsoft became one of the largest companies in the world ...