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Authors: Dr. Sai Loo
Keywords: creative workers, knowledge economy, education, economics, management, sociology, physchology
Abstract: The knowledge economy is now present in the developed world, and researchers like Drucker (1994), Quah (1999), Castells (2000) and Reich (2001) have advocated its existence for nearly three decades. There are three aims of this keynote speech. The first aim is to argue for the existence of the knowledge economy though there are no agreed definitions of this new style economy. The second is to identify and characterize a type of knowledge workers, which I call creative workers, and the third aim is to investigate how these workers may be educated. This keynote is based on an empirical study involving semi-structured interviews from three developed nations of England, Singapore and Japan. The two related sectors of the knowledge economy are advertising and information technology (IT) software. The interviewees included relevant practitioners and academics in the two industries. In this keynote, I will refer to a conceptual framework where the characteristics of these creative workers are identified. The structure is drawn from the disciplines of economics (Quah (1999), Reich (2001)), management (Zuboff (1988), Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), von Hippel (2006)), sociology (Lash and Urry (1994), Castells (2000), Knorr Cerina (2005)) and psychology (Csikzentmihalyi (1988), Gardner (1999)). This interdisciplinary approach offers a critical understanding of the workings of these workers, whether they are working individually or collaboratively and in different contexts. Creative work may be defined as a combination of innovative applications by these workers to perform their functions/roles in the knowledge or digital economy including anticipatory imagination, problem-solving, problem seeking and generating ideas and aesthetic sensibilities. How each of the creative applications is applied is dependent on the role(s) of the creative workers (Loo, 2017). In addition to these creative applications, these workers also require particular abilities, aptitudes and skillsets. They also need specific know-how, such as disciplinary knowledge. The complex combinations of creative applications, attributes, skill sets and know-how require a supportive environment including information, communication and electronic technologies (ICET) infrastructure for these creative workers to operate in. The rest of the keynote focuses on the education of these creative workers.