How the law of asymmetric competition should affect innovation policy
I was just alerted, by our resident neonomad pattern recognizer Dante, of a research disseration regarding competitiveness in a knowledge base economy.
The full title is: The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy. I’m listing the abstract below, and though I have not read it yet, it seems to take a innovative and disruptive approach to the topic.
This is a good occasion to recall our own hypothesis regarding how peer production and innovation affect innovation policy:
1) the law of asymmetric competition: any corporation or nation, facing a for-benefit institution as competitor, which uses open and free forms of knowledge, participatory modes of production, and commons oriented knowledge pools, will tend to loose to the latter
2) any nation or corporation using closed proprietary formats of knowledge, cannot rely on participatory communities for co-creation, and does not develop commons oriented knowledge pools, which tend to loose to those who do adopt such pracitices
3) therefore, we need partner state approaches and platforms which enable and empower the social production of use value, and mechanisms through which the benefits of private capture of positive externalisations of social innovation, can flow back to the communities to make them more sustainable
Here is the abstract of the thesis by Harry Hillman Chartrand:
“My objective is to deepen and thicken public and private policy debate about the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge–based economy. To do so I first demonstrate the inadequacies of the Standard Model of economics, the last ideology standing after the Market-Marx Wars. Second, I develop a methodology (Trans-Disciplinary Induction) to acquire ‘knowledge about knowledge’. In the process of surveying the event horizons of seventeen sub-disciplines of thought, I redefine ‘ideology’ as the search for commensurable sets or systems of ideas shared across knowledge domains and practices. Third, I create a definitional avalanche about knowledge as a noun, verb, form and content in etymology, psychology, epistemology & pedagogy, law and economics. Fourth, I establish the origins and nature of the Nation-State, the shifting sands of sovereignty on which it stands and the complimentary roles it plays as curator, facilitator, patron, architect and engineer of the national knowledge-base. Fifth, I examine the competitiveness of nations with respect to a production function in which all inputs, outputs and coefficients are defined in terms of knowledge. In the process, I demonstrated that competitiveness, as win/lose against rivals, is inadequate because it does not account for symbionts and environmental change. Accordingly, I propose ‘fitness’ as a more appropriate criterion. Finally, I consider the comparative advantage of nations given their initial and differing national knowledge endowments.”
August 21st, 2008 at 11:33 am
[...] basato su un rapporto di partnership riconosce che è la legge della competizione asimmetrica (asymmetric competition) a dover dare supporto all’innovazione [...]