Comment: Every business student learns the cautionary tale of those who invested in the railroads. Fortunes made in the early days of the railroads were quickly lost as newer forms of transport were introduced.

The lesson to be learnt from this apparently is that, instead of defining your business as being the supplier of a particular product or service, you should define it as the satisfying of a particular need.

The parable of the railroads underlines the need for adaptability in business.

Just as an organisation must adapt and embrace new challenges, so must we all at national level. If the Republic wishes to nurture the competitive advantage, which has brought us such benefits over the past 10 years, we must be willing to anticipate and embrace the constantly changing business environment. The factors that underpinned growth and development in the recent past will not be sufficient in the future.

Potential rays of light in the recent gloomy economic outlook were the ESRI medium-term forecast and the terms of reference set by the Tánaiste for the Enterprise Strategy Group.

The ESRI believe we could be looking at growth of up to 6 per cent per annum in the latter half of this decade. But it suggests it is very much up to us whether this growth happens or not. Crucial to maximising profits in the future is a shift to a knowledge-based economy - a shift, if you will, from making the boxes that house the computers to dreaming up the technology that drives them.

Increasingly, competitive advantage and continued economic growth rely on solving problems in innovative and creative ways, on doing things in new and better ways. This means a new focus on fulfilling the potential of the workplace, improving profitability through staff involvement, team working, outsourcing, sub-contracting and new management structures.

The public sector must also speed up and improve how it adapts to change. The general quality of life in the Republic is hugely contingent on the performance of the public sector. Sometimes, it can seem as if the Government claims to be pouring more and more money into areas such as health and education while the return, in terms of service provision, gets increasingly unsatisfactory.

In questioning how this can be, we need to look at the third variable. Driving the relationship between money being put in and services coming out is, of course, performance - effectiveness and efficiency. By effectiveness I mean doing the right thing, by efficiency I mean doing it well. This, too, will require new ways of thinking and working.

All of which are just a few of the reasons why the Taoiseach has asked the National Centre for Partnership and Performance to set up the Forum on the Workplace of the Future.

Changing how we work at ground level, an area often ignored, is perhaps the most effective way towards creating more value, working smarter and maintaining our competitive edge through knowledge and innovation.

Take one statistic that illustrates the challenge that lies ahead - four out of five technologies we now use will be obsolete within a decade and 80 per cent of us will have to relearn our jobs to a dramatic extent over the next decade.

This means that it is an incredibly exciting time right now for employees and employers. Everything is up for grabs.

Partnership, which has been such a stunning success for this State, was based on a new paradigm. What partnership said was that the old adversarial model of working relations wasn't necessarily correct in this new world. By working together in the world of flux, everyone could have a bigger slice of the pie without anyone else losing out.

It is a paradigm, which changed the traditional role of unions too. Unions must increasingly see themselves as enablers, benefiting their members in new ways, by facilitating productivity and profitability.

In envisaging the workplace of the future we must look to another paradigm shift - a shift to a workplace that is flexible, competitive, responsive, creative and innovative. There can be a new way of working and living that not only satisfies human beings more but that creates more profits for investors, many of whom are workers themselves.

Over the coming months, the National Centre for Partnership and Performance will preside over a forum that asks some crucial questions. We will look at how organisations in the private sector can develop the flexibility to anticipate the great technological and competitive challenges of the world marketplace. We will ask how the public sector can adapt to change and, in doing so, provide real value to the taxpayer.

Equally, we will examine how we can meet the needs of a changing workforce, providing the kind of job satisfaction that can drive innovation and dynamism. And, crucially, we will ask some of the most dynamic business and union people and the most clued-in academics how best to manage the workplace of the future and how national policy and supports can help companies and organisations adapt to a new business environment.

Peter Cassells is executive chairman of the National Centre for Partnership and Performance and will chair the Forum on the Workplace of the Future. You can join in this national dialogue by visiting the Forum website (www.ncpp.ie\forum).