INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE "KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY"

Abstract

This paper deals with the intellectual capital and focuses on the most important musts for the knowledge society: quality of goods, continuous innovations, low costs and time (feedback speed). They are understandable since the contemporary global economy rests on the private capital whose primary interests are reduction of production and transaction costs and profit-making. The offspring is the capital enlargement, creation of strategic business alliances in the world, explosive improvement of technologies for higher productivity and an approach to the man rather as capital than simply as manpower. The intellectual capital affirms itself in such conditions and becomes actual (i.e. "intellect and capital") by "linking" knowledge + information + creativity and innovation + intellectual property as assets + experience + networking and by imposing new rules and new understanding of power, which is not so much about money any more but rather about information. The specific of the intellectual capital lies not only in its virtual, information, i.e. non-material and impalpable character but primarily in its capacity to create a new product that makes profit. That is actually the key reason why we must approach the intellectual capital as a national, and consequently social, macro-economic category that the national wealth and entire country and people's well-being depend on. Namely, the society wealth is primarily generated in production, thus giving importance to human intellectual capital, structured intellectual capital and market and consumer intellectual capital. Its functioning urges constant review of education, employment and entrepreneurship stimulation policies and policies of transfer of technologies, instruments for protection of intellectual property, policies of integration of production, education system and science, foreign-economic links, information protection policies etc.