Challenges to the Global Information Society

World is rapidly changing and every country is a competitor on global economic market. Some of them try to reduce tax rates, some offer cheap workforce, some compete with new technologies. How can Europe success in this risky arena? Pekka Himanen believes in network form of organization and growth based on creative innovations. What does it mean?

Golden mean

The United States uses neoliberalist model, which enables everybody to do as much as you manage. Show as your capabilities and we appreciate it. But if you not succeed, we leave you behind. This model is very dynamic, but not for all society, says Himanen. There is a huge amount of people, who are left behind and public sector is quite poor. As well the Singapore model has a lot of disadvantages – attempts to offer lower taxation causes, that at the moment somebody offers better conditions, we have no weapon to avert a threat. Moreover, this model is also patronizing - freedom and rights of people could be easily restricted which can negatively influence potential of people’s creativity.

Using Himanen’s vocabulary, current European model is combination of information society and welfare state. This model grows up from traditional European values, if is closely connected to innovative entrepreneurialism and creativity of society, then is considered to be Golden mean of development.

Key values

Himanen introduces ten basic values, which are traditional and broadly shared in (in my opinion western and central) Europe. Their encouragement and new comprehension are fundamental to reform European welfare state combined with information society (Finnish model). The values are caring, confidence, communality, encouragement, freedom, creativity, courage, visionariness, meaningfulness of doing and balance of all components.

Briefly, new welfare state should more support equal opportunities for everybody and in global view for all people worldwide. System should guarantee social care and confidence, which together with caring and freedom makes background for communality and enable create innovative and creative environment. People feel more courage and easily fulfill their visions and start new projects.

Fields of implementation

Successful global competition needs to implement core values in practice, particularly to a creative economy, a creative welfare society, humanly meaningful development and a global culture. Key terms in this process are creativity and innovation. Welfare society needs quite large expenses and the only way to keep economical growth is only through innovations. Himanen highly recommends improving employees´ conditions to be more motivated and creative. For example it is non-fixed working time, time for innovation and experiments with new technologies. Creative environment should be supported in all corporations and management should appreciate these efforts. Moreover, higher productivity of labour mustn’t lead to jeopardize jobs, otherwise all passion will fade.

Very important is increasing quality of people’s personal lives. People are already overloaded of work and the population is ageing. Long life learning programmes are necessary for keeping people´s minds in good condition and also it is essential to get their personal live in more natural way – more time for family, sports and own project and activities. The result will be more satisfied employee with less physical and psychical troubles who brigs his/her company more use than only ordinary work.

European economics can not increase production of traditional goods too much. Ideas must become the raw material for most of product. Himanen therefore exhort to cooperate also with other cultures which can bring new points of view and modus operandi into present processes.

Conclusion

Himanen’s paper tries to deal with European development opportunities in global competition. His view is quite optimistic, but on the other hand he describes most of processes and trends in general and not indeed. Practical implementation will need many years of tuff work on all levels of society. Some theoretical and practical inspiration I can see in Anthony Giddens´s “third way” practically used in British Labour Party policies. It could be valuable source of experience.