ABSTRACT
Firms do not know in a vacuum; they know in ‘context’, and this is recognized in the economic literature on innovation: technological knowledge cumulates systemically, it is created using pre-existing knowledge, and it is highly indivisible. Producing technological knowledge is a collective process in which each agent has unique yet complementary information (Antonelli 1999; Richardson 1972). This perspective describes knowledge as a collective good, given its features of radical indivisibility and input complementarity in its production:
When these conditions hold, the productivity of a given technological knowledge will be much higher if everybody would be willing to put in a common pool all its knowledge that is complementary to many others . . . We may say that such generation of knowledge is an archetype of a network externality effect, where resources productivity is as much higher as many more agents are participating in the net.
