(EID-005) “LET A THOUSAND COMPANIES BLOOM”

With not much success to show as we passed the Agricultural Age and the Industrial Age, we are now hoping that we could do well in the Information Age, also known as the Knowledge Economy. Figuratively speaking, we scrapped our agricultural focus and we embraced a new industrial focus, only to breed infant industries that could not survive the mature tests of globalization. Where do we go from here?

As I see it, it is better for our country to view the three “Ages” not as sequential stages, but as incremental ingredients to a composite economy that should incorporate all three. Better still, we should aim for the convergence of all three ingredients, in such a way that each one would complement and strengthen the others.

Simply put, we should have built an industrial economy on top of our agricultural economy, using the latter as a complimentary source of raw materials. Moving on, we should have built a knowledge economy on top of our agricultural and industrial economies, modernizing the other two in the process, without departing from them.

As we try and compete in the global economy, we should do so with products coming from our agricultural base and our industrial base, and not just with services coming from our knowledge base. What this means is that we should modernize and upgrade our existing farms into corporate farms, and our cottage industries into corporate producers.

Learning from the experience of other economies, we should build networks of small corporations around the big corporations, thus forming supply chains that would benefit both the small companies and the big companies.

As we see it now in the global economy, marketing is the front-end activity that only the big players could win and sustain. As a way to give them a place in the global equation, we should give our small players the back-end role to produce for the big players, thus turning small scale entrepreneurship into a resource that could beef up our front lines against globalization.

As always, the best place to start is in the policy arena where we should pass laws and executive orders that would encourage big companies to outsource manufacturing tasks to small companies. Putting together the small players, they could then play as big players in the back end.