Proceedings of the International Conference Theory and Applications in the Knowledge Economy TAKE 2017

Book excerpt: Foreword A famous Portuguese Poet once said around one hundred years ago; “before I was born all the words that should save the Humanity had already been written.., the only thing that was missing was to save Humanity.” Fast forward to the 21st century services led and knowledge based economy, and we have myriads of theoretical study about the decisive assets – namely intangibles. Those analysis are made in several perspectives, namely Human Resources, Knowledge Management, Intellectual Capital, and also many sectorial perspectiveslike Trade, Economics, Logistics, Social Policy etc. However, today the question about the applicability of all these studies remains unsolved. So, it like, many of the words that will save the Knowledge Economy have already been written, all we need is to save the Knowledge Economy…Or is it not? The idea behind TAKE Conference was to provide a multidisciplinary forum in which those multiple perspectives will come together. We believe it is a fruitful operation and we intend to continue the exercise in the future. The problem of the relation between theory and practice in the knowledge economy is getting more important and not lessimportant with the development of the BRICS and other nations. TAKE main question will be one of the problems of the 21st century. Following the promising start of TAKE 2016 in Aveiro, Portugal, TAKE 2017 was organized by the Faculty of Economics of Zagreb University, around Prof. Blazenka Knezevic. I would like to thank her and her team for the massive effort in putting TAKE 2017 together. It will be a very nice and memorable conference. I would like also to thank the 5 keynotes, the special sessions and workshop organizes, the authors of the 60 papers and 5 posters, the stream leaders, the reviewers and the sponsors for the efforts. And to the 90 participants from 20 countries: Austria, Bosnia‐Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Netherlands, Mexico, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States. A special word to Prof. Gaby Neumann from Wildau who organized the Proceedings. Let us make TAKE 2017 a great occasion and help save the knowledge economy a bit. Eduardo Tomé, Conference Chair Zagreb, July 2017