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on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Economy |
| By: | Beckerman, Carina (Dept. of Business Administration, Stockholm School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | Improving the artefacts a knowledge worker uses and how he or she exercises his or her knowledge is a desire that is part of being professional, especially since we are supposed to live in a knowledge society. In the knowledge society there is a continuous structuring and re-structuring, construction and re-construction and learning and re-learning going on due to implementing new information and communication technology. But many of these so called IT-projects fail, especially within health care in spite of management spending huge amounts of money on them. This paper focuses on and wants to create an awareness of how an artefact such as a new knowledge management system becomes a driving force behind expanding the knowledge of an anesthesist and has implications for continuous learning among a group of employees at the anesthesia and intensive care clinic. Implementing new technology is an underestimated opportunity for learning. More importantly, this paper also suggests that a significant educational effort is taking place in society channelled through many these IT-projects, even when they fail. |
| Keywords: | professional artefacts; learning; knowledge management system; knowledge management; the knowledge society. |
| Date: | 2007–08–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhb:hastba:2007_008&r=knm |
| By: | Claudio A. Piga (Dept of Economics, Loughborough University); Giuseppe Medda (DEIR, University of Sassari, Italy.) |
| Abstract: | We study whether a firm’s total factor productivity dynamics is positively influenced by its own R&D activity and by the technological spillovers generated at the intra- and inter-sectorial level. Our approach corrects simultaneously for the endogeneity and the selectivity biases introduced by the use of a firm’s own R&D as a regressor. A firm’s involvement in R&D activities accounts for significant productivity gains. Firms also benefit from spillovers originating from their own industries, as well as from innovative upstream sectors. |
| Keywords: | R&D, TFP, selectivity, treatment effect |
| JEL: | C21 C80 D24 O30 |
| Date: | 2007–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rim:rimwps:08-07&r=knm |
| By: | Lundin, Nannan (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)); Schwaag Serger, Sylvia (ITPS) |
| Abstract: | As one of the world’s largest recipients of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), China is emerging as a key global player in Research and Development (R&D). This rapid increase in R&D investment is mainly attributed to the effort of strengthening the indigenous innovation capacity of domestic actors and, to an increasing extent, to the process of globalization of R&D with multinational enterprises as key driving force. This paper provides a detailed overview of the relative importance of foreign R&D in China based on quantitative mapping in terms of R&D inputs, outputs and local linkages in R&D-related activities, combined with an in-depth description of the nature of foreign R&D activities. Our empirical observation suggests that the growing importance of China in the globalization of R&D is more than a ‘flash-in-the-pan’. On one hand, China is facing new challenges, but at the same time is attempting to seize the “window of opportunity” to compete for knowledge and human resources through structural adjustments and new policy initiatives. On the other hand, multinational enterprises from OECD countries are not only intensifying, but also diversifying their activities in a larger number of R&D intensive sectors in China. In such a rapid and dynamic development, China seems to emerge not only as an important source of R&D but also a key magnet of global R&D operations. |
| Keywords: | China; R&D; Globalization; Multinationals |
| JEL: | F23 O31 O32 |
| Date: | 2007–08–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0710&r=knm |
| By: | Dag Rønningen (Statistics Norway) |
| Abstract: | Recent decades have been characterized by rapid technological change. In the same period, early withdrawal from the labor market has increased markedly. One particular question concerns the effects of technological change and organizational change on the labor market participation of workers of different ages. The question posed in this paper is whether technological change and organizational change are biased against age, thereby causing a shift in demand from older to younger workers. We estimate the effects of organizational change and technological change on wage bill shares for five age groups. By using panel data, we control for unobserved firm fixed effects. The results indicate that organizational change raises the wage bill share for workers in their forties but lowers the share for workers in their fifties. The wage bill shares of the youngest and oldest workers are hardly affected by organizational change and technological change. Separate estimates for men and women yield qualitatively similar results. In regressions for different educational levels, wage bill shares are positively affected by organizational change for highly educated individuals in their thirties. Technological change increases the wage bill share of highly educated workers in their sixties. For workers with intermediate and lower levels of education, the results are similar to those obtained from the whole sample. |
| Keywords: | technological change; organizational change; age-biased labor demand |
| JEL: | J23 J31 O33 |
| Date: | 2007–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ssb:dispap:512&r=knm |
| By: | Massimo D'Antoni; Maria Alessandra Rossi |
| Abstract: | This article aims at clarifying the role played by licenses within the increasingly relevant Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon. In particular, the article explores from a theoretical point of view the comparative properties of the two main categories of OSS license--copyleft and non-copyleft licenses--in terms of their ability to stimulate innovation and coordination of development efforts. In order to do so, the paper relies on an incomplete contracting model. The model shows that, in spite of the fact that copyleft licenses entail the enjoyment of a narrower set of rights by both licensors and licensees, they may be preferred to non-copyleft licenses when coordination of complementary investments in development is important. It thus provides a non-ideologically-based explanation for the puzzling evidence showing the dominance, in terms of diffusion, of copyleft licenses. |
| Keywords: | intellectual property rights, open source, copyright, copyleft, GPL license, incentives to innovation. |
| JEL: | L17 O34 |
| Date: | 2007–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usi:wpaper:510&r=knm |
| By: | Antonio Nicita; Matteo Rizzolli; Maria Alessandra Rossi |
| Abstract: | This paper explores the interface between two important institutional pillars of market exchange – Intellectual Property (IP) law and Antitrust law – in light of a theory of property rights incompleteness. This theory interprets property as an incomplete bundle of both defined and undefined rights over actual and potential uses of given resources and defines externalities as joint claims over rival production uses of undefined entitlements, irrespective of whether the object of property rights has a tangible or intangible nature. The paper argues that traditional distinctions between physical property and IP based on attributes of tangibility, rivalry and excludability are misleading and bases on the substantial homogeneity of property rights and IPRs an argument supporting the complementarity between IP law and Antitrust law. Far from being an unjustified ex-post limitation to existing property rights, likely to undermine ex-ante incentives, Antitrust intervention represents one of the means by which incompletely specified property rights (both intellectual and tangible) might be redefined over time as externalities emerge. |
| JEL: | O34 L4 |
| Date: | 2007–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usi:wpaper:509&r=knm |