Business knowledge focuses on generating innovations with a high potential for creating value for companies and their clients. When companies get involved in areas of large potential for value creation, their respective countries have more chances of reaching high growth rates.

In an information and knowledge-based economy these elements become key factors of production, productivity and competitiveness for all agents involved in this new paradigm and, on the whole, they turn to be an essential tool for our countries’ social and economic development.

Some countries’ economic success is to a good extent due to education models linked to economy and the socio-economic process. Therefore, the interests of society’s sectors converge when selecting their education policies, building a suitable environment for the development of each nation’s objectives.

Education systems in developed countries go hand in hand with State’s and society’s needs. Policies adopted link the countries’ productive life to companies and to universities which are directly connected to large organizations. While universities educate and transmit knowledge, companies are engaged in supporting research and development.

Although an extensive corporate, academic and business network generates, disseminates and applies new knowledge in the developed world, reality is that such network is still limited in Latin America.

The aforementioned situation has, among other things, strongly impacted on the region’s development and growth. In 1960 Latin America represented almost 8% of worldwide commerce; 20 years later, its participation was less than 6% and in 1990, 3.3%. Participation in the technology world market is below 2%, against US’ 43.5% or 23.7% of the Assia-Pacific region. The gap between Latin America and the world seems to be widening.

Meanwhile, China and India offer enormous marketplaces with sustained economic growth. As explained before, our region has lost relevance because of its crises and ongoing socioeconomic ups and downs.

Poor scientific investigation encourages faculty researchers to emigrate to American or European universities in search of development. This is a tremendous cost both to business schools investing in academic education and to Latin American economies, which lose invaluable human capital.  

Companies and individuals in the more developed economies contribute to research by financing university professorships, sponsoring specific research works or conferences or financing adequate infrastructure. This is still incipient in Latin America.

Lack of investigation limits our understanding of how to promote innovation and enterprise in our region and places our companies at a great disadvantage against international competence, thus obstructing our countries’ growth.

As we enter the global knowledge society, regional companies must take the initiative and commit themselves to business schools to create knowledge areas that will turn them internationally competitive.

It is necessary that regional business schools generate and disseminate their own knowledge focused to understand and solve or mitigate our region’s typical problems. In many occasions companies have confronted problems applying “recipes” originated in developed countries that have failed in our environment because of the huge differences and particularities of our regional reality.

In this transition process towards an information and knowledge society, the Latin American nations’ first challenge is to achieve a fast and simultaneously efficient and equitable dissemination of information technologies and knowledge within national economies.