Transnational Resort: a Transformative Investment in the Global Knowledge Economy

The global ascent of the knowledge economy has opened an unprecedented opportunity to value the earth’s evolutionary and ecological fabric as a transnational reservoir of latent scientific knowledge that could define this emerging economy as profoundly as oil has shaped the industrial economy. It has also uniquely positioned the international resort enterprise to bring science into the heart of a business model in which quality and prestige grow along with investments in geographically unrestrained scientific discoveries and which delivers formidable legacy dividends in its defiance of monopoly over the funded research. The article expands on these original assertions, the accomplishments they ignited, and the academic credentials that fortify them, with an emphasis on the business model’s capacity to build novel economic foundations for global conservation and to empower basic science at the most challenging scale above national jurisdictions where it merits designation as common heritage of mankind. It discloses how the resort sites’ label as premier real estate wastes many of these sites’ worth as crossroads of wonder-packed connections among variously distant ecosystems, geological formations, and other pillars of the earth’s architecture. It translates this disclosure into a blueprint, for new-generation resorts, of the power to align a private enterprise system with appreciation of knowledge as a precursor of future knowledge and, in the process, to chart a transformative course for the global knowledge economy. An island portfolio in the Gulf of Panama and the Hawaiian island of Lanai are profiled in their distinctive potentials to emblematize the rewards.