Key Issues in Advancing Knowledge and the Knowledge Economy
Management and integration
The shift toward distributed systems adds value, increases flexibility and reduces costs. However, distributed systems of knowledge production amplify the natural tendency of knowledge to fragment through specialization and localized application. This requires rebuilding knowledge structures and facing demands for coordination and integration that increase dramatically with scale. This in turn leads to renewed undertakings in modularization, specialization, distribution of creative tasks, and high-level integration, including production and use of integrative knowledge, such as standards, norms, interfaces, common architectures and platforms.
ICTs and infrastructure
Information and communication technologies and infrastructure are critical to managing the costs of learning, coordination, and transactions -- whether through email, Web services, or multiparty collaboratories. The willingness to share or contribute knowledge is related to the cost of doing so, and the intensive use of information technology and infrastructure is critical to minimizing this cost. For example, the success of voluntary user-to-user assistance in open source software communities is based on the very low marginal cost of writing and transmitting. Information technology can also help lower the learning costs that arise when newcomers have to deal with innovation tasks. Toolkits based on high-quality computer-based simulation, rapid prototyping tools, and user-friendly interfaces are critical to migrating design tasks from suppliers to users. Information technology also facilitates performance and interpretation of multiple experiments. It helps create information and data abundance by dramatically decreasing costs of storing, searching, retrieving and combining data -- albeit at peril of increasing congestion and incoherence.
Control and openness
Distributed systems of innovation and learning change the way innovators capture part of the social surplus generated by innovation. In many collective learning situations and collaborative projects, the definition and enforcement of intellectual property rights can become complex, burdensome, even counterproductive. It can also be problematic when knowledge developers and innovators move between jobs or when networks of practitioners are working closely under expectations of reciprocity. Openness has emerged as a business strategy and a factor in market demand, and we see the use of intellectual property and reach-through licensing to manage collective as well as private assets. At the same time, lower standards and stronger presumptions for patents may reduce confidence in collaborative strategies.
Proximity and location
Distributed systems based on ICTs are largely unconstrained by geopolitical barriers, resulting in the virtually free dissemination of codified knowledge across the globe. The geography of innovation is now structured primarily by the location and strength of spatially dispersed professional communities. However, this is only one part of the story. Although costs for transmitting tacit knowledge are falling as the cost of bandwidth diminishes, location remains important since most of the virtuous characteristics of collocated synchronous interactions are poorly supported by ICTs. Clustering is still important because incentives and capacity for coordination derive in part from a critical mass of firms with shared competences and the ready availability of high-level interaction on common problems.
Trust and quality
ICTs enable new channels of collaboration, information exchange, and learning at the distance. While these channels vastly increase access to information and knowledge, conventional means of establishing trust are often bypassed or weakened. New procedures and mechanisms are needed to ensure the integrity and quality of knowledge institutions and transactions. At one level, this is a matter of security and privacy – knowing the identity of the person or site and knowing that the communication has not been corrupted or compromised. It is also a matter of ensuring the value or quality of knowledge available in new ways, such as finding alternatives to peer review that take advantage of rapid, costless dissemination and the potential for immediate feedback. New professional and institutional arrangements are needed to recognize and accredit online learning and other knowledge services. The proliferation of new channels at different levels raises questions of how different knowledge processes can be made work together for private benefit and to enhance the functioning and value of epistemic and practice-based communities.
Policy
Historically, different spheres of knowledge activity – education and
training, research, learning by doing, and knowledge management in business
and commerce – have been governed by different institutions, norms, and
policy sets. This is changing as demands and mechanisms have emerged to encourage
knowledge flows across sectors or take advantage of joint costs and benefits.
While knowledge flows are generally enabling, the interaction of different
values, expectations, and policy regimes often generates friction and contention.
As funding agencies support larger, multi-sector, and more open projects, it
becomes more difficult to design and enforce policies through contract. Instead,
public laws and policies will dominate, although not necessarily to favorable
effect. High-overhead regimes that may be cost-effective in certain industrial
environments may introduce burdensome costs, risks, and opportunistic behavior
in less capital-intensive environments.