Athena Alliance is a non-profit organization dedicated to public education and research on the emerging global information economy. It seeks to bring together organizations and individuals to help meet the challenges posed by the emerging information economy.
The information, intangibles, and innovation (I3 or I-Cubed) economy is now a reality. Information, knowledge and other intangibles now power economic prosperity and wealth creation. Intangible assets – worker skills and know-how, informal relationships that feed creativity and new ideas, high-performance work organizations, formal intellectual property, brand names – are the new keys to competitive advantage. Intangibles and information drive our innovation process, a combination of formal research and informal creativity. These elements combine to produce productivity and improvement gains needed to maintain prosperity.
Reshaping the Debate
The economic rules have changed; public policy has not caught up. Governments are struggling with ways to utilize information, foster development of intangibles, and promote innovation and competitiveness in this new economy. Policy makers are grappling with the urgent need to frame policy questions in light of the changing economic situation.
Issues of developing and utilizing information, managing intangibles and fostering innovation underlie discussions on a variety of subjects, such as intellectual property rights, education and training policy, economic development, technology policy, and trade policy. Crafting new policies in these areas requires infusing a better understanding of intangibles and the information economy into the public debate.
Athena Alliance undertakes outreach activities to help members of Congress, the Administration, constituency groups and the media better understand the issues and craft policies and programs.
Crafting Strategies, Policies and Tools
This economic shift calls for different ways of thinking about economic activity, different means of promoting and organizing economic opportunities and activities, and different economic policies and programs. But, understanding is not enough. We must also enlarge the repertoire of strategies, mechanisms, tools, and capabilities that individuals, firms, and communities can use to shape their own positive economic futures, with special attention to those in danger of being left behind. A key issue is the ability of all Americans to participate, both economically and socially, in the emerging new information economy. In this regard, Athena Alliance undertakes practical policy research aimed at creating new solutions to this new set of problems.
Building Partnership and Sharing Knowledge
Numerous groups and individuals are actively seeking to understand the challenges of the global information economy and develop new tools to confront those challenges. These include: academic and scholarly research; corporate policy, research and strategic activities; and practical on-the-ground efforts by community activists and economic development practitioners. Athena Alliance seeks to bring these activities together, into the public debate, through conferences, workshops, research activities, publications and reports, and public education activities.
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