THE DYNAMICS OF KNOWLEDGE GOVERNANCE

Markets and hierarchies are unable to provide economic systems with the generation and use of the appropriate amount of technological knowledge because of its idiosyncratic characteristics as both an economic good and an economic activity. Knowledge governance is necessary in order to overcome these limits. Knowledge governance consists in an array of institutional settings that combine and integrate market transactions and personal interactions, ex-ante and ex-post coordination both among firms in the economic system and between them and the academic system created by the State. Knowledge governance is intrinsically dynamic. Its ingredients and mechanisms keep changing with the continual introduction of new modes. This dynamics exhibits the typical traits of an emergence process whereby the identification of limits and failures engenders a creative reaction that eventually leads to the articulation of a new mode.