The Knowledge socio-economic Life Cycle: The Role of Firms

Knowledge has always had a leading role in the economic and social development, and in the past few years, there has been a growing interest in treating knowledge as a significant economic resource to achieve competitiveness. But knowledge presents very peculiar characteristics and dynamics, quite different from those of tangible resources, and requires a specific theoretical lens to be analyzed. In the first part, the paper focuses on the important properties and taxonomies of knowledge as economic resource. In the second part, the paper frames an original model to analyze the knowledge socio-economic life cycle and its relationship with firm behavior. On one hand, we observe that knowledge presents its own life cycle: through all times, all types of knowledge keep evolving, travelling around the world, and then fall again in the oblivion, following a non-stop movement of diffusion. On the other hand, we state that every age has its own knowledge-based organizations and institutions whose social role is knowledge exploring, storing, sharing, teaching and learning. Firms create new knowledge due to their efforts in new processes and new products developing; they “destroy” old knowledge with radical innovation; they contribute to knowledge fertilization across countries and industries through their licensing, cross licensing, free licensing and patent pooling strategies; and sometimes they cause knowledge oblivion through their off shoring/delocalization decisions. The aim of the paper is to offer an integrated model to contribute to understand how firms concur to shape the knowledge life cycle as they formulate strategies and design organizational processes involving knowledge exploration, exploitation, brokering, destroying and, sometimes, saving from oblivion.