The 2007 State New Economy Index. Benchmarking Economic Transformation

Economies – national, state, or local – have two principal ways
to grow over the medium and longer term. They can get
bigger by increasing the number of employed workers, or
they can get more productive, increasing the value each
worker produces.

It is not the strongest of the species that survive,
nor the most intelligent,
but the ones most responsive to change.
— Charles Darwin

Today’s economy is knowledge dependent. Of course,
managers and “knowledge workers” have always been part
of the economy, but by the 1990s, they had become the
largest occupational category. Managerial and professional
jobs increased as a share of total employment from 22 percent
in 1979 to 28.4 percent in 1995 and to 34.8 percent in 2003.2
In contrast, about one in seven workers is employed as a
production worker in manufacturing, and even there,
knowledge and continual skills enhancement is becoming
more important

Robert D. Atkinson and Daniel K. Correa
The Information Technology
and Innovation Foundation

Full Report: http://www.matr.net/files/The2007StateNewEconomyIndex.pdf

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(Many thanks to Monica L. Babine at the Center to Bridge the Digital Divide at Washington State University http://www.cbdd.wsu.edu for passing this along. Russ)