Starting off with quote from Peter Drucker is a good way to build your bona fides: Subbu Machiraju cites Drucker’s observation that “The basic economic resource – the means of production – is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge."

True enough. And as Machiraju observes, “never more true than it is right now.”

Machiraju, the director of the DuPont Sustainable Solutions (News - Alert) Center for Knowledge Management (CKM) located in Hyderabaad, India, says in the increasingly competitive landscape, “sustenance is largely dependent on continued focus in the areas of innovation and the creation of new offerings while continuing to explore new, alternate business models and markets.”

Research happens in one place or more, prototyping at another, manufacturing at another and services that follow at yet other destination, he says, noting that “this geographical spread brings with it cultural diversities, language barriers, multiple time zones -- all adding complexities to efficiently usng the knowledge, which is the most important resource for an effective and sustained business growth model.”

He touts collaboration as a way to overcome this, particularly open source communities like those from Android (News - Alert) and Apple for app development, or Kickstarter.com for “a micro-fundraising and knowledge sharing platform for tech start-ups, amateur movie producers and so forth.”

Earlier this month TMC (News - Alert) had the news that Jaspersoft, maker of a widely-used business intelligence (BI) software, announced Self-Service Express, a new subscription service available to open source community members that want premium, professional-grade BI documentation and knowledge base articles.

Requested by over 80 percent of the JasperForge community in a 2011 annual survey, Self-Service Express provides access to Jaspersoft's entire commercial customer portal and will make tens of thousands of Jaspersoft community members more productive as they create reports and dashboards and do analysis using Jaspersoft open source BI products.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.