Discrepancies in Demand and Production of Intellectual Capital: Can We Reimagine Capitalism to Bridge the Gap?

Capitalism cannot be stationary. Hence, any variant of a capitalist world is driven by sufficient and sustained production of intellectual capital, be it by advancing technological development, know-how, and best practices or by shaping and accepting new attitudes and social relations. In the past, financial markets succeeded by and large in efficiently allocating resources in order to sustain progress, oftentimes measured by growth. However, continuing along these lines may well lead to a post-capitalist “new feudalism,” with extremely pronounced autocracy-in-capitalism structures. Huge new and complex challenges tend also to question this hitherto well-focused financial approach. Principal global threats to the status quo are (a) environmental, (b) military conflict, (c) mass migration, and (d) the introduction of AI at scale. To a large extent they seem to be inseparable and they do influence business outlook. In response to these challenges, at the organizational level, new and desirable changes must be designed and implemented, namely, (i) reforming outdated labor relations to attract and create adequate workforce, (ii) enabling proof of creativity to boost innovation, and (iii) finding much-improved ways of knowledge transfer and diffusion. We aim at examining candidate strategies that work by means of increasing the transparency, fluidity, and inclusiveness of business opportunities at appropriate levels. They emphasize the importance of entrepreneurial ecosystems and include the possible role of company-internal universities, of cooperative and resilience-oriented inter-firm management, and also, as a cross-fertilizer, advancing conceptual thinking in terms of more complementarity in product and technology structures within and between of enterprises.