New Delhi, Nov. 15: Strong and quality educational base is required for strong knowledge economy, said Kapil Sibal, Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences at the Make (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise) Award Ceremony organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), here on Wednesday.

The education system of India needs a complete make-over and should adopt skill and knowledge based education to get employable graduates, said Sibal.

The annual Indian MAKE Award recognizes the best Indian organizations in Knowledge Management (KM) based on an annual study conducted by the Know Network. The annual Indian MAKE study serves as a benchmark to recognize those Indian companies which are leaders in effectively transforming enterprise knowledge into wealth-creating ideas, products and solutions.

The winners of the Indian MAKE Award 2007 are Bharti Airtel, Eureka Forbes, Infosys Technologies, Larsen & Toubro, Satyam Computer Services, TCS, Tata Steel, Wipro Technologies and the overall winner was Mindtree Consulting.

Speaking on the global MAKE award trends, Rory L Chase, Managing Director, Teleos said that Asian MAKE leaders have reached parity with their European counterparts, but lag behind many North American MAKE leaders. He said that Asian MAKE leaders are focusing on intellectual property, intellectual assets and brands, but lack enterprise-wide intellectual capital management strategies.

Asian and European MAKE leaders must focus more on creating world-class learning organizations as Asian firms will come under growing pressure to implement best practices in creating value from customer knowledge, said Chase.

Appreciating the changing knowledge scenario, Kapil Sibal said that India should create an appropriate environment for people to come back and work for India. Food security, healthcare and environment are the key challenges for the world and Chemistry and bio-technology will drive the knowledge requirement to face the situation, he said.

India needs calibrated approach to develop knowledge workers and government is planning to build centers of excellence within the universities to take advantage of the available talents, said Sibal. True requirement of knowledge management will come only when there is surplus of knowledge and knowledge workers, Sibal added.

Deepak Puri, Chairman and Managing Director, Moser Baer said that India is today on the road to becoming a globally recognized knowledge giant and is emerging as the leader in the new knowledge economy, primarily due to India’s significant advantage over the developed world in terms of human resources.

He said that participating in KM significantly improves revenue growth, competitive advantage and overall employee development in the long-term whereas reduction in costs, improvement in marketing and enhanced customer focus are some of the immediate benefits of successfully implementing a KM programme.

Focusing on KM to strengthen internal factors is absolutely acceptable but companies should also gauge other external benefits such as share price growth and improved brand loyalty, added Puri. (ANI)