“The weakness or even complete absence, of definition, is actually pervasive in the literature… this is one of the many imprecisions that make the notion of “knowledge economy” so rhetorical rather than analytically useful” (Keith Smith, What is the Knowledge Economy? Knowledge Intensity and Distributed Knowledge Bases, Institute for New Technologies Discussion Paper 2002-6, The United Nations University, June 2002).
The purpose of Defining the knowledge economy is to fill ll part of the gap identifi ed in the quote above. The main aim is to explore testable definitions. In other words, do they allow us to measure in a robust way through national and international statistical and survey data the knowledge economy, the knowledge workforce and the knowledge-based firm?