TEN TRENDS AND TURNING POINTS

TEN TRENDS AND TURNING POINTS OF THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
YEONG-LONG CHEN
Office of Research and Development, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
IB9F, No.43 Sec.4, Keelung Rd., Taipei, 106, Taiwan
E-mail: chen@office.com.tw
GUAN-YI LI
Graduate Institution of Finance, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
IB10F, No.43 Sec.4, Keelung Rd., Taipei, 106, Taiwan
E-mail: ssscansss1022@gmail.com
Knowledge in the era of knowledge economy means not only professional, education, skills or patent development, but also innovative, dynamic changes for the development of new tools, new processes, new resources, new ideas and new actions. As technical developments affect individuals, households, and businesses more directly and more deeply, factors such as how to handle the falling of borders among organizations and nations, how to extend the confines of business cooperation, how to enter the areas of cross-field interaction and innovation, how to listen attentively to customers’ requirements, how to let customers be more involved in research and development (R&D), how to build multiple directions and prompt communication channels, how to integrate virtual and real resources, how to develop the power of team intelligence, how to work together on projects, how to quickly create a web of public relationships, and how to facilitate knowledge sharing, are all necessary for businesses to conquer the shrinking profit margin issue. We propose a conceptual framework for addressing the ten trends of knowledge economy development, including globalization, collaboration, intersectional innovation, customerization, diversified communication, virtualization, individualization, outsourcing, social-networking, and knowledge-sharing. Each trend is an additional turning point for a business. For example, globalization is a ways to deal with costly materials, collaboration can be helpful for business on too small a scale, intersectional innovation helps deal with the non-direction of a business organization, customerization helps deal with overstock problems, diversified communication can remedy time consuming work, virtualization can help deal with insufficient resources in an organization, individualization can help deal with the problem of an unknown brand, outsourcing can help deal with an insufficient labor force, social-networking can help deal with the lack of personal networks, knowledge-sharing can help deal with the lack of a knowledge base. If a business can design an ideal solution scheme for each turning point, it may overcome the current problem with shrinking profit margin, so as to promote the development of the business into a knowledge industry, and further help in the transformation, upgrading and growth of that business.
1. Background and motives
The opening up of the world of internet information and global resources, transparency of expert net and intellectual properties, appearance of tools for rapid mobile communication and the disappearing of organizational boundaries and national borders, all bring new ways of thinking and a turning point to businesses. Facing the coming era of the knowledge economy, small and medium enterprises are experiencing an M-shaped trend in their financial margins, but the same working hours (Ohmae, 2006). Those businesses who can find new tools, new processes and new resources, so as to encourage new thinking and adopt new approaches, can not only promote the benefit of efficiency, but find the directions of upgrade and transformation. Whereas other businesses may suffer from increasingly long working hours and tiny profit margins due to the use of costly raw materials, lack of labor force and resources, poor sales, and so on. The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework for addressing the ten trends of the knowledge economy, including globalization, collaboration, intersectional innovation, customerization, diversified communication, virtualization, individualization, outsourcing, social-networking, knowledge-sharing, etc. In addition for an introduction of the causes and key features of the ten trends, we also outline ten principles for helping enterprises get through the bottleneck of a tiny margin. Hopefully this can lead small and medium enterprises to welcome the coming of the knowledge economy, to open up the freeer running into the knowledge industry.
2. The evolution of the knowledge economy
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issued a report on the knowledge economy in 1996 where they contended that the economy based on knowledge will change the patterns of global economic development. Knowledge has become the main force promoting productivity and economic growth. Following the quick development and heavy application of information communication technology, the increase of output, employment and investment will obviously require turning to the knowledge-intensive industries (OECD, 1996).
Chesbrough (2003) proposed the concept of open-innovation in his book Open Innovation, contending that not all wise employees work for companies, that more and more useful knowledge is spreading among various sized companies and global territories. The difference between closed and open innovations is that the former focus on the internal aspects of research and development, production, and control processes, while the latter one focus on the external performance of research and development, thereby creating far more value, building up the best solution to cross internal and external thought.
In 2003, Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2003) was discussed where the wisdom of the multitudes was postulated to rise sharply, allowing the formation of community sites through social networking. Commercial cyber platforms allowed the displaying of non-hot commodities infeasible to display in traditional shops and thus the finding of more business opportunities. In his work The Long Tail, Chris Anderson (2006) destroyed the conventional 80/20 rule. In this way wisdom of crowds could be integrated and linked on web platforms in less that no time, thus forming the mechanism of group-decision-making by the non-expert. Its achievement was even better than by expert intelligences.
In the OECD issued 2004 report, Innovation in The Knowledge Economy, they proposed the concept of the innovation tank with four pumps (OECD, 2004). If the assumed innovation was a car, the four pumps to drive the car to move were: (i) science-based innovation. Science plays an unquestionable role in advancing knowledge. However although it can produce rapid progress in knowledge, its findings are often generalized and applied only slowly. (ii) Collaboration among users and/or doers. New actors are becoming engaged in innovation processes, developing collaborative modes of knowledge generation, and this creates new opportunities. (iii) Modular structures, each with freedom to innovate, yet joined together in a whole innovative system. This evolved the character of innovation into complex technological systems thus creating new needs for co-ordination and certification. (iv) Finally, the effective harnessing of information and communication technologies, as an instrument of innovation, can be a powerful trigger for transforming activities.
In 2006, IBM issued the Expanding the Innovation Horizons: The Global CEO Study, in which they detailed in depth interviews with 765 CEOs worldwide, inquiring relative issues of innovation (IBM, 2006). Their results showed that those CEOs thought the sources of innovation idea came from the following: internal employees, external business partners, external customers, consultants, competitors, and so on, in that order. In contrast, internal sales and service sections and research teams were ranking behind. Such results also correspond to the viewpoint of Chesbrough (2003) as discussed in the book Open Business Models.
Knowledge highlighted in the era of the knowledge-economy means not only professional, education, skills or patents, but also innovative, dynamic changes in new tools, new processes, new resources, new ideas and new actions. As technical developments affect individuals, households and businesses more directly and more deeply, those factors such as how to handle the features of the falling of borders among organizations and nations, to extend the confines of business cooperation, enter into cross-field interaction and innovation, listen attentively to customers’ requirements, let customers be more involved in research and development (R&D), build up multiple directions and prompt communication channels, integrate virtual and real resources, develop the power of team intelligence, wisely use the approach of working together on increasingly small projects, quickly building the net of public relationships, and facilitating the power of knowledge sharing, are the new turning points and keys for businesses to conquer the issue of shrinking profit margins.
3. A conceptual framework of the ten trends of the knowledge economy
For the development of a new economy, a knowledge economy, the now economy (Economist, 2002), we combine open innovation and Web 2.0. We attempt to propose a conceptual framework (Figure 1) for addressing the ten trends for developing the knowledge economy, including globalization, collaboration, intersectional innovation, customerization, diversified communication, virtualization, individualization, outsourcing, social-networking, knowledge-sharing. We also illustrate the practical applications by real cases under current trends. Hopefully, this can help small and medium enterprises to find new turning points and ways to break through the bottleneck of the tiny profit margin.


Figure 1 Conceptual framework of the ten trends of the knowledge economy
3.1. Globalization
A columnist of the New York Times and winner of the Pritzker Prize, Friedman (2005) suggested in his book The World is Flat that globalization has entered into its third generation. In Globalization 1.0, the driving force came from nations; in Globalization 2.0, it came from enterprises; nowadays, in Globalization 3.0, it comes from individuals. He also points the borders between nations and organizations are being fading. The world has been flatted by the ten bulldozers of digitalization, e-trends, virtualization, outsourcing, supply chains, open software. In the era of globalization, everyone should welcome the trends instead of resisting them by building higher walls.
The Japanese master for strategic management Prof. Ohmae, discussed an example in his book, Lower-Middle No Shougeki (Ohmae, 2006). The problem was that the price of rice price was four times higher in Japan than in the U.S.A. or Singapore, and three times higher than in Australia. In addition, the price of beef price was five times higher in Japan than in Australia, and 4.5 times higher than in Singapore or the U.S.A. Prof. Ohmae discovered one thing after visiting Australia, that the Australian agricultural manager was doing all the work, equal to the work done by a whole family in Japan, alone. One such farm could produce 1% of the total rice output of Japan. Furthermore, when studying production procedure, it was discovered that the manager hired odd-job workers for about 3 days for seeding. To take care of the farm more efficiently, he sloped the land at regular one hundred meter intervals to facilitate the running of water around the whole farm. Temporary workers again be hired during the harvesting season. Therefore, the Japanese farm could provide sufficient rice for all demands from only buying one hundred lots of such kind of rice farm. Even when the transportation cost was added in, Japanese consumers were still able to buy the rice for 1/10 of the current price.
In the face of economic globalization and locality integration, the borders between enterprises and nations are fading. In particular, through the links of the internet, the virtual cyber world crosses the barriers of time, space and distance. This becomes a totally new, abundant resource system, where even the information transparency brought about by the cyber world encourages a more open business pattern. It is crucial for businesses to deal with the increasing prices of raw materials, so as to control costs and integrate resources, to promote competiveness by using global resources more intensively, and to undertake the arrangement worldwide under the strict impact of globalization.
3.2. Collaboration
According to Wikipedia, collaboration means when “two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals” (Wikipedia, 2006). Collaboration is an innovation that does not necessarily require leadership, and may even bring better result by releasing power and equalitarianism. The book, Collaborative Advantage, clearly proposes the concepts of collaboration and extended enterprise simultaneously (Dyer, 2004). It contends that the extended enterprises represent a group of enterprises in the value chain, who cooperate to form an integrated team by means of collaboration procedures, to achieve a virtual combination. The virtual integration mentioned in the book means that the business partnership is just like the employee relationship in an internal enterprise.
Toyota Motors has won the honor of being the most admired knowledge enterprise (MAKE) five times since the construction of their plant in North America in 1986. This is due to their global arrangement, incorporating the core capabilities of prompt production skills, operation of satellite plants to new plants in new nations or branches, taking advantage of local success experiences, to occupy the new market. This enhances information exchange among their suppliers, sharing all relative knowledge regarding promotion of skills and production procedure. At the same time, to avoid the appearance of the free rider who does not contribute to the production team due to selfishness, or ignorance of internally valuable knowledge, Toyota Motors has established a worldwide knowledge sharing network. Their knowledge sharing system enhances self growth and learning of internal supplier units. This helps them to face various production issues together. Toyota Motors allows partner suppliers to build up multiple channels of communication. They also offer intensive paths of communication between suppliers and master plants. After knowledge management was added into the framework, Toyota Motors transformed their previously inefficient net sharing to the currently more mature and efficient net sharing (Dyer and Nobeoka, 2000).
In the situation of limited resources faced by small and medium enterprises, who should concentrate such resources in the creation of core value, and simultaneously share the enterprise value in the net, can generate the overall value of “1+1>2”. This is done by mutual knowledge sharing and collaboration among various cultures, fields and experts.
3.3. Intersectional innovation
Johansson (2004) pointed out in The Medici Effect, that the intersection of different fields, subjects and cultures, and the combination of existing concepts, can generate abundant, new, breakthrough ideas. This intersectional innovation is called the Medici Effect. The three motives for such innovations are: (i) the movement of people; (ii) the convergence between scientific disciplines; (iii) the leap in computational power.
The innovative plan of IBM in 2007 allowed tens of thousands of IBM employees, customers, partners, even their family, in 160 countries worldwide, to participate in a new proposal, a web site, “Innovation Jam”. The plan was not only a brain-storming plan, but also allowed participants from different cultures, to exchange work and life experiences. The purpose were not only to provide the creation of new ideas, but more importantly to discover new market opportunities, offering really helpful solutions leading to improvements in commerce and society. IBM also committed itself to realize the best selected creations to the tune of USD 100,000,000 (IBM, 2008).
In recent years, the Harvard Case Study has become common in local colleges. It was based on group discussions to propose solutions from different fields. The instructors play the solely role of make the introduction and giving suggestions. The inspirations generated from the discussions are normally the most innovative and doable solutions. Therefore, when the small and medium enterprises are faced with difficulties like competition from big enterprises and lack of funds for R&D, they should integrate their cross-field talents and resources, to perhaps create another “Harvard Enterprise”.
3.4. Customerization
Since conventional enterprises normally consider “production orientation”, they usually start from the core abilities they have. They then use the uniform production procedure to take advantage of convenient and steady channels to provide their products and services to customers. Nowadays with transparent information and rapid changes, the changes of likes and dislikes for products and marketing channels are becoming are occurring more quickly, and the possibility of unsalable goods getting bigger. Enterprises must adopt customization to correspond to the needs of the digitalization era. To tailor marketing channels to suir customer needs it is necessary to know the demand, to use flexible production procedures which can respond to current market trends, and use their core capabilities to provide customers with the products and services in demand. If an enterprise is limited to only internal core capabilities and resources, they might utilize outsourcing into account, job-sharing and integration to make up the lack (Small and Grice, 2001).
The development of internet technology had made communication between enterprise and customer more prompt and diverse, and hence, the tailor-made trend has been upgraded to customerization. That is, the enterprise should start not only by looking at the customer demands, but further allowing customers to participate in designing, R&D and group-decision-making. Google for example tests a beta version of a new product in the Google Lab. It welcomes the criticism and testing from hundreds of thousands of net friends worldwide before launching the new product. This strategy enlarges the number of national backgrounds of the testers. More importantly all these testers may be potential customers of Google in the future. Hence, listening to customers’ needs and criticisms and adjusting products accordingly are the chief contributors to success of Google Lab (Google, 2008).
Overthrowing the conventional mindset about producer orientation, customerization may not only bring about new commercial patterns for enterprises, but also save input costs for R&D, design, marketing, and inventory. Hence, through the participation of customers in the inspiration and design of self-need products, enterprises can get to know the real requirements of their customers. This helps them to make adjustments to promote the client loyalties, which helps to solve the bottlenecks of overstocking and resource waste due to mass productions.
3.5. Diversified communication
Entering the “now economy” (Economist, 2002), communication channels are becoming more diversified. In addition to the traditional face-to-face encounters, letters, phone calls and faxes, the paths of electronic and internet services like e-mail, msn, skype, 24hr on-line service webs, blog, Web 2.0 and so on, all speed up enterprise communications. Entering the mobile era, we have 3.5G smart cell phones, personal digital assistants, wireless notebooks, along with the integration of WiMAX and the Ubiquitous trend. All of these generate a continuous communication environment in the form of people versus people, people versus machines, machines versus machines.
The problems of unsymmetrical information with paper communication mean that too much time is spent due to differences in perception, concepts, operating processes, between common enterprises and customers, which can even affect good mutual relationships. However, in the knowledge economy, more and more new resources and tools are being developed that make it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises to adjust business patterns and transform time-consuming costs into constant growth. This is done by properly using the technology of digitalization, the net, virtualization, mobilization, and so on, in response to environmental changes.
3.6. Virtualization
In recent years, the virtualization of organizations and man-power has become an irresistible trend. Virtual teams have gradually appeared. The so-called virtual team is a work team combined to meet the common goals or benefits, which communicates across time and space. Coordination, discussions, document exchange, etc, are carried out by means of conventional phone, fax, and face to face meetings, or more advanced communication tools such as instant messaging, cell phones, computer, internet, video, electric whiteboard, discussion forums, and so on, to complete a pre-determined project or mission by ways of job-sharing. According to the book Virtual Teams, the four patterns of virtual teams are: purpose, people, links and time (Lipnack and Stamps, 1997). One well kown American web site, www.virtualteamworks.com, has assessed a virtual team after two to three months of cooperation. They have discovered that the overall efficiency of the virtual team is twice that of a conventional work team who cannot perform long-distance communication, in terms of trust, communication, cooperation, trouble shooting, decision making and executing capability.
For constant growth, enterprises must invest funds in software, hardware and training. However, most enterprises cannot absorb those new costs for office, manpower, and long-term equipment due to the limits of their financial resources. New costs must be transferred to product prices, a burden ultimately borne by the customer. Hence, whether learning to use limited physical resources combined with unlimited virtual resources, through digital organization establishing virtual mobile offices and work teams, allocating enterprise resources, simultaneously strengthening the considerable competiveness of the markets, will be the key factors for the continuous growth of enterprises.
3.7. Individualization
A columnist of New Yorker magazine, Surowiecki has told many stories regarding “Crowd wisdoms are superior to experts” in the book, The Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki, 2004), similar to an old Chinese saying “The wisdom of the masses exceeds that of the wisest individual”. For example, in the US there is a TV show: “Who wants to be the millionaire” where there are some two emergent solutions (i) The player calls out to ask his most smart friend, relative, teacher or expert. (ii) To allow the audience to call in to offer solutions, then, do a statistic survey on the two solutions in terms of true ratio, as a result, the calling out ratio is 65% whereas the calling in is 91%.
This is the era in which the tiny individual power cannot be ignored. An uninfluential group of people can answer questions based on common sense, integration, and cooperation more wisely than the most intelligent individual can do. This also explains why in Korea and Japan, people are encouraged to report on small events or news items by themselves every day, just as a reporter would do (www.Ohmynews.com). No only this, dull-sale commodities which would never be displayed in main-stream shops or shopping males may even break the 80/20 rule (long tailed effect) due to the non-physical-space limit in on-line shops (Anderson, 2006). Many US internet companies have discovered that the sales volumes of non-stream or dull-sale CD, DVD, or books in physical shops, make up 20%040% of the overall sales volume.
3.8. Outsourcing
Enterprises can not only outsource non-core jobs to external entities, but also core jobs after proper categorizing. These outsourced jobs can be returned to the company for collection and integration. Thus, the most professional experts may do the most professional jobs. The cooperative entities for outsourcing are normally non-core or expertise-complimentary companies, or professional studios or individuals, who complete the mission in compliance with a preset agreement. They can perform their jobs inside the offices or at designated locations.
Outsourcing due to considerations of cost saving and resource integration may not only speed up project progress, but also promote job quality. In the era of transparent information, it becomes easier to access professional enterprises or experts in different fields. In the past, differences in profession made people feel worlds apart, but nowadays, even those in same profession feel worlds apart. In today’s conditions, job sharing is becoming increasingly rare. Learning to link up outsourcing capabilities to overcome the barriers of insufficient talents, without doing jobs independently, will become the new challenge for future organizations.

3.9. Social-networking
With the concept of Web 2.0 comes the establishment of social-networking, a fast and simple platform for collaborative publishing, development of two-way communication tools, taxonomy of readers, all highlighting online collaboration and information sharing among users. Web 2.0 is a new situation following the net evolution, which arises due to continued development of technology offering speedy access, prompt interaction and diversified service. This is an active evolution after the volume of net applications has reached a critical point. Really simple syndication (RSS) is an automatic mechanism on the Web 2.0 platform for easy collection and transmission of web information and news. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) can perform non-synchronous requests without having to wait for feedback from servers, thus speeding renewal at the web users’ ends. Tag is a flexible and interesting approach to journal sorting, allowing users to add one or more tags in each journal, thereby creating more links and communication with other users. Finally there is the blog, an abbreviation of weblog, which can be used as a diary recording daily life or work. (Wikipedia, 2008)
Web 2.0 speeds up the development of the web and social-networking offering the facilities for community web sites. Small and medium enterprises commonly face the problems of hard sales and few orders, as a result of the lack of personal networks. At present, the new tech innovations facilitate collaboration and information sharing among users. In the era of Web 2.0, the power of the net public is considerable. Learning how to apply technology to build up networks as a substitute for traditional personal relationships (single versus multiple) is one way to facilitate the advantages of relative marketing, and will be a big issue for enterprises.
3.10. Knowledge-sharing
Ikujiro Nonaka proposed the concept of “ba” (a Japanese concept meaning “place”). Knowledge is embedded in “ba”, where it is then acquired through one’s own experience or reflections on the experiences of others (Nonaka and Konno, 1998). The spiral of knowledge (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) is an influential concept in the knowledge management field. This perspective illustrates four processes for creating knowledge value through interactions between tacit to tacit, tacit to explicit, explicit to explicit, and explicit to tacit knowledge. The four interaction processes are: socialization, externalization, combination and internalization. The main instruction is that as more and more employees of enterprises are involved in the interaction of tacit and explicit knowledge, the speed and scale of knowledge transformation will become faster and bigger, to further transform individual knowledge into organizational knowledge, even to the cross-organizational level. The sudden appearance of MIT (2008) OpenCourseWare, which can be translated into multiple languages in few years. Wikipedia possesses 7 times as much data volume and 100 times the browsing rate of the British Encyclopedia, and is the result of the sharing of knowledge workers and global peer-review.
The innovation of future enterprises and creation of organizational intellectual capital should be done through data collecting and sorting, thereby forming meaningful information, and transforming this into knowledge useful to the enterprise by integrating the information with personal experience, truth, judgment, intuition, and value. Small and medium enterprises can take advantage of the expansion of knowledge sharing. The inexhaustible features of knowledge information can reproduce knowledge, driving knowledge management, to establish the culture of knowledge sharing allowing every employee to become proposal raisers, though under the situation of limited manpower. That is, the creation of knowledge or intellectual capital starts from knowledge sharing among organization employees. The enterprise will never need to worry about having no “think-tank”.
4. The ten turning points to break through the tiny profit margin
Ten trends represent ten turning points as well as ten windows of opportunity. For small and medium enterprises to break through the current bottleneck of tiny profit margins, they must aggressively seize the new changes presented by the trends of the knowledge economy. Here we discuss factors in terms of trends, features, chances and bottlenecks; see table 1.
(i) With the coming of the era of globalization, borders between organizations and nations are becoming fuzzy. Transparent information and easier electronic-purchasing will afford enterprises more chances to find cheaper raw materials.
(ii) In the era of collaboration, enterprises will expand the confines of cooperation to integrate partnerships, suppliers and customers as part of the enterprise, without any barriers to employee numbers, space, or scale.
(iii) Breaking stereotypes regarding persons, matter, materials, to undertake cross-field thinking and innovation will allow enterprises to find new directions for transformation.
(iv) The era of customer orientation is not merely listening to customers, but also customerization, that is allowing customers to participate in the design, R&D, and decision making processes, so as to decrease unnecessary production and inventory.
(v) The real-time technology of digitalization, net, virtualization, and mobilization allow multiple-ways for immediate communication with partners and customers, so as to minimize time and cost.
(vi) The traditional concepts of enterprise resources for production, marketing, manpower, development and finance, must be broken up in no time. The resource matrix of an enterprise includes real objects, and virtual, internal and external resources. The capability of resource integration will determine the competiveness of an enterprise.
(vii) In the era of individualization, the wisdom of the masses is rising sharply. The approach of properly adopting group-decision-making, and breaking-up the myth of solely selling hot goods and brands should be aggressively considered.
(viii) Learning how to outsource and control quality could override the barrier of insufficient manpower.
(ix) Web 2.0 brings fast new social-networking. It is also a new turning point for enterprises to apply technology to build a personal networking map, and to facilitate relative marketing.
(x) The knowledge economy means the era of opening and sharing, so that enterprises will never worry about having no “think tank”. They can start the knowledge management, build up the culture of knowledge sharing and allow all employees to be both proposers and participants.

Table 1. Ten trends and ten breakthroughs of the knowledge economy
Trends Critical features and turning points Bottleneck breakthrough
Globalization Borderless organization or nation Costly materials
Collaboration Extension of cooperational confines Low scale
Intersectional innovation Intersectional innovation between-fields No directions
Customerization Start from customer demands, customer participation Excess inventory
Diversified communication Real-time, multiple-way communication Time consuming
Virtualization Integration of virtual and real resources Insufficient resources
Individualization Appearance of crowd wisdom No brands
Outsourcing Tiny devision of labor Insufficient labor force
Social-networking Fast establishment of relation-networks No personal networks
Knowledge-sharing Power of knowledge sharing No think-tank

The features and turning points are obviously visible behind the ten trends of the knowledge economy mentioned above. There is at least one solution hidden behind each turning point which can assist small and medium enterprises to smoothly enter into the knowledge economy and knowledge industry. These should be helpful to the transformation and upgrading of enterprises.
5. Summary
Combining the development of the new economy, knowledge economy, now economy, open innovation and Web 2.0, we propose a conceptual framework including ten trends of the knowledge economy. We discover that in the course of future development of knowledge industries, small and medium enterprises will face new challenges and trends such as globalization, collaboration, intersectional innovation, customerization, diversified communication, virtualization, individualization, outsourcing, social-networking, knowledge-sharing and so on. These ten trends also represent ten turning points or ten windows of opportunity. Small and medium enterprises should aggressively make changes to follow those trends.
Employees should not be evaluated solely on the basis of working hours. A brain storming worker could also be a very efficient one but with quite short working hours. In future schools, students should not be evaluated solely by grades. A thoughtful student may be an inspirational one but with low grades. In future R&D, researchers should not be evaluated solely by the numbers of patents. An innovative researcher might have many new ideas for changing human life and contributing to social development but with few patents. Nowadays the era requires flexibility, sharing and collaboration, even opening and linking. Enterprises and individuals should both throw away traditional burdens, change outdated habits, leap behind conventional minds, examine and modify the existing system at all times, in order to welcome the coming era of new tools, new processes, new resources, new minds, and new actions.
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