The Third Industrial Revolution and the New Middle Ages

Thurow ¢ We are in the middle of the third industrial revolution, shifting from an industrial economy to a knowledge-based economy. For the first time in history, human knowledge has great economic value. In the past, the richest person in the world owned natural resources such as land or oil. Now, Bill Gates is the richest person in the world and what does he really own? He controls a knowledge process. This fundamentally changes economic development. It addresses the topic of this book, Creating Regional Wealth in the Innovation Economy . How do regions get intellectual growth nodes started and thriving?

Regions can have many of the ingredients , but no one of them can guarantee success. For example, in the U.S. there are lots of good universities, but there are none of these Silicon Valley or Boston Route 128 complexes around them. Nobody is going to replicate Silicon Valley; even Route 128 is not exactly like Silicon Valley.

For the first time in history, human knowledge has great economic value.

One interesting test for a region is whether after a downturn it is capable and versatile enough to pop back up again. Some regions may make a wrong bet on technology and they may have difficulty re-emerging. It may be focused differently than it was before. Resilience is something you want to take a look at.

Attali ¢ We are in a New Middle Ages. Middle Ages were not an end, but a beginning of a new world. People began to become free of feudal societies and empires. They became interested in cities, finding new ways of connecting through the printing press. That destroyed and fragmented the empires, giving more power to the cities. This also gave birth to the capacity of critiques by people and scholars. It is what is happening today. With the fragmentation of the large empires, such as the former Soviet Union, there is the emergence of new nations. New technologies can be seen as the equivalent of the printing press, creating more networks and fewer pyramids , and opening to a lot of potential futures .