Thinking Paradigm Shift: Innovative Ecosystems Creative Class And Growth Drivers

The Malthusian Trap

Using the original Angus Maddison data set from the Maddison-Project database, the authors of the article constructed population dynamics of countries for the period from 1 to 2030 (forecast), which also confirms the empirical findings of Derek Thompson.

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Analysis of economic literature shows that in the era of "Great geographical discoveries" from the middle of the XV century to the second half of the XVII century, creative people with entrepreneurial skills got the opportunity to escape beyond the boundaries of their tribal community or "comfort zone". During this period, mostly Europeans discovered new lands, in particular, paved the sea routes to the "New World": Africa, America, India, Asia and Oceania. Later the Columbian exchange (Crosby, 1972) took place, which was the widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, and ideas between the Americas and the Old World. Invasive species, including communicable diseases, were a byproduct of the Exchange. In that context, the exchange among civilizations was growing, which became an important stage in the formation and development of the creative community of the world as a whole, by concentrating the early growth drivers of innovative ecosystems in certain regions (England, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc.).

According to Marx and Ryazanskaya (1977), the great revolutions occurred in trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in connection with geographical discoveries and the rapidly developing merchant's capital. They constitute one of the main points that contributed to the transition from the feudal mode of production to capitalism.

In the preface of his book, "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," Marx wrote: "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness"(Marx & Ryazanskaya, 1977, p.32).

Empirically this transition from one stage of development to another is clearly observed on the totality of the data presented in the diagrams and figures given in this article. It can be seen that the new stage in the development of society required economic actors to use more rational methods of production and available resources each time, and it is clearly visible that there was a need for better education.

The dynamics of the evolution of education (Figure 03 ) clearly shows that at the turn of the year 1850 there was a thinking paradigm shift in the world, first of all this happened due to the emerging need in new knowledge that people realized by shifting from religious schools, based on faith, to universities based on the yarning for knowledge - the mind that allowed to nurture and perfect modern methods, as well as approaches to teaching.

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With creative community occurrence, the basic conditions were settled, which were the first growth drivers of the innovative ecosystems in the world.

Knowledge evolution

Today, through the retrospection of the change in the generations of schools and "universities," one can see a picture of the world that dominated in different historical periods, within which begin to be clearly visible the trigger points, the future basis of "industrial revolutions".

In 2000, Scott (2000) published his version of the link between the evolution of universities and the evolution of human knowledge and development of civilization (Figure 04 ).

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Since the creation of the first university in the 8th century, universities have undergone a significant transformation. Emerging as the Universities of the Faith, their knowledge was often open only to the authorities, they trained officials, diplomats, military leaders and taught grammar, rhetoric and philosophy, as well as natural sciences - arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. This regime lasted for 500 years:

1088 – University of Bologna

1096–1167 – University of Oxford

1134 (charter granted in 1218) – University of Salamanca

1209 (charter granted in 1231) – University of Cambridge

Since 1209 there has been an active process of dissemination and education, mainly in Europe, the leading universities of the world, which are active today: Oxford University, Cambridge University, University of Padua, etc.

As a result of the Enlightenment, universities transformed from the Universities of the Faith to Reason. Parallel transformations took place in a society with a world economic structure. The agrarian era was replaced by an industrial one.

Between 1820 and 1875 just at the peak of the rapid spread of the transport technologies such as railways and steamships there was an increase in the mobility of people and their concentration in the first urban clusters (Karayalcin, 2016).

The development of the urban economy required talented young people and specialists. New views, talents and creativity were accumulated in the first points of attraction - urban clusters. Studies show that a cluster is a group of interconnected organizations (companies, corporations, universities, banks, etc.) concentrated in a certain territory, which can be considered as an independent unit with certain properties.

This definition shows that universities occupy the central link in the cluster, and now the economic growth of countries in the world depends on the level of education and costs on science.

Today in most of the countries basic education is perceived not only as a right, but also as a duty of the government to create unconditional guarantees within the framework of which access to the population for basic education is granted.

This was not always so: the promotion of these ideas began in the middle of the XIX century, when most modern industrialized countries began to expand primary education, mainly due to public finances and state intervention. Data from this early period show that public funds for financing the expansion of education come from different sources, but specifically a decisive role is given to the taxes at the local level. The historical role of local public school funding is important to help us understand changes or perseverance in regional disparities.

The second half of the 20th century marked the beginning of the expansion of education as a global phenomenon. Available data show that by 1990, public expenditure on education as a share of national income in many developing countries was already close to the average in developed countries.

Expenditures for higher education are presented in Figure 05 .

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This global expansion of education in the twentieth century led to a historic decline in education inequalities around the world: in the period 1960-2010, education disparities declined each year for all age groups and in all regions of the world. Recent estimates of educational disparity by age group indicate that developing countries still have to expect further reductions in school inequality.

Empirical analysis

In 2000, Don Edward Beck made a presentation for the World Forum in New York, and then in 2001 published an article " Stages of Social Development: The Cultural Dynamics that Spark Violence, Spread Prosperity, and Shape Globalization " in which indicated that the change of social paradigms look more like waves than steps (Beck, 2000).

According to Beck and Cowan (2009), any social system contains previously calibrated code of all previous ones and in this sense any country is a set of complex historical layers and principles of organization. At the same time, collective thinking forms glue, which holds together the group, self-defines the group and reflects that place on the planet that it inhabits. Cultural waves, like matryoshkas, consist of unique elements, survival codes, myths of origin, artistic forms, life styles and general sensations.

Alan Tonkin developed this approach and showed how different values affect the development of democracy in countries (Figure 6 ). The presented approach allows a more holistic view on the world historical picture in the aspect of changing the thinking paradigm, exit from the Malthusian trap and the development of the creative communities in societies. To approach the modern stage, which the authors of the article call "Network Globalization," society needs to change the eight main waves of development.

From Figure 6 it is obvious that at any particular moment in time, any point on the graph looks like a plateau uniting the entire aggregate of the social development wave in the individual and collective minds of the studied society. Some authors call such features "paradigms" or "levels of psychological existence" without covering of which the world cannot have further development.

The foundation of the creative community was new benchmarks on values in the field of innovations and cardinal reforms that took place at the turn of the 1800s (Ferreira et al., 2016), which subsequently led to the transformation of the social system of the world community, emergence of new professions that had a significant growth in productivity around the world (Attar, 2015).

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With the advent of the alphabet, records, printing, newspapers and lately Internet, a rapid growth of a strong creative community takes place in society, which affects value systems and types of democracies, reduces waves in time (Figure 6 ), and the plateau of differences in the social development of society has dramatically decreased, - where the cultural code began to "dry up". As a result of the world globalization there was launched an irreversible process of transcoding society which is clearly reflected in the turbulence of the world economy. Such a process will be passed in the next century and globalization will move to the network level.

Currently, the term "globalization" refers to the process of global economic, social, political integration and unification (Novikova, 2009).

Modern innovations contribute to accelerating globalization, opening up new opportunities for social and economic development, meanwhile they create serious problems that result in crises, poverty and inequality both within society and between countries.

In the era of "Network Globalization" the economy is expressed in accelerating the speed of capital transactions and their scale, the growth of international trade in comparison with GDP growth. The diagram 7 shows how GDP the per capita has changed in the world.

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This feature is also confirmed by the study, which was conducted by Jamus Lim, a specialist of the World Bank. In Figure 08 he showed dominance peaks of regional economies for the period from 1 to 2001 (http://www.worldbank.org/).

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The authors understand the term "Network Globalization" as the process of continuous changes aimed at integrating national economies into a single world economy infrastructure using the network platform of a market economy.

Undoubtedly, globalization aims to accelerate the exchange of goods and products, information, knowledge and cultural values, and thanks to unprecedented growth in technologies we can see the acceleration as well in communications, science, transport and industry. Global integration increasingly causes erosion and sometimes even the destruction of national sovereignty of states.

In this regard, the main task of the creative community in modern society is the generation of non-standard and innovative ideas, as well as their implementation in practice. Accelerated exchange of innovative goods and products, information, knowledge and cultural values leads to a process of accelerating scientific and technological progress in the world.

Authors believe that the acceleration process was caused by the introduction of network platforms, which are already a key link in the global economy. This structure is actively used by many leading companies and scientific centers, which are at the forefront of the innovative economy. Their full implementation and usage in practice allows achieving acceleration in scientific and technological progress and with the use of modern methods and tools such as artificial intelligence, there will be a transition to more creative work. The future of modern universities and scientific schools depend on how quickly they can integrate the network platform into their structure and create a universal self-organizing innovative ecosystem around themselves.

Undoubtedly, the high level of development of the economy of any country depends on the introduction and use of advanced technologies, as well as on the level of education and science in general.

Today, Western countries are spending more on research and development than in Russia, so the European Union spends an average of $ 337.9 billion on research and development (Figure 09 ).

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In 2015, the US spent more than $ 462.7 billion on R & D. In turn, China over 376.8 billion dollars and Japan 155.8 billion dollars. Figure 09 shows that the Russian Federation lags significantly behind the previously cited countries by more than 8 times in the indicator under study.

In 1965, an American architect, futurist and inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), together with an assistant, artist and sociologist John McHale (1922-1978), published an illustration to the report "Shrinking of Our Planet" (Fuller, Buckminster, & McHale, 1965).

The figure shows how the evolution of vehicles and communication media compresses the size of the Earth and speeds up the travel time. It should be noted that this analysis allowed R. Fuller to be the first who pointed out the long-term trends of industrialization and globalization in the 1930s.

In turn, Gordon E. Moore in 1965 pointed to the acceleration curve of computational technologies and derived the " Moore’s law" (Papon, 2017; MacK, 2015) (Figure 10 ).

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R. Fuller like E. Moore used his comprehensive approach to compare the global impact to the development of smaller and more efficient technologies of what he called "accelerating acceleration" and "ephemeralization."

According to Karl Rupp, who studied the 40-year statistics of the development of microprocessors dynamics (Figure12), in the near future we will see an increase in the number of nuclei in proportion to the number of transistors, but this significant leap in development will be provided by the transition to more modern algorithms that will implement massive parallel computations (Rupp, 2018). These data also correlate with the data published in Ray Kurzweil's book "The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology" (Kurzweil, 2005).

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The presented research shows that recently the structure of the world economy has changed rapidly under the innovation trend. The structure is already united by network platforms and the processes taking place in the world is bound to intensify and create technological backwardness of developing countries. It is empirically evident that the rate of such changes grows nonlinearly and there are limits that can restart the entire development in the furure. What this phenomenon will lead to – a new paradigm of thinking, new growth drivers or a creative community that requires changes – the question remains open.