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on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Economy |
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Issue of 2026–07–13
four papers chosen by Laura Nicola-Gavrila, Centrul European de Studii Manageriale în Administrarea Afacerilor |
| By: | Jeffrey Gardiner |
| Abstract: | This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed. |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2606.18288 |
| By: | Manassé Drabo; Horatio M. Morgan |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the impact of cultural and industrial diversity on innovation across 152 Canadian urban areas from 2001 to 2021. By applying a knowledge spillover lens, it associates such diversity with enhanced knowledge variety and diffusion. Using inventor counts and Shannon indices as proxies for innovation and diversity, the authors show that cultural and industrial diversity fosters innovation. An increase of one standard deviation in cultural diversity raises innovation by 13.4% to 81.7%, while the same increase in industrial diversity raises it by 6.6% to 36.6%. Their interaction synergistically yields an additional 2.2% to 12.4% increase in innovation. Meanwhile, recent immigration diversity amplifies these effects, validating the knowledge mechanisms and highlighting significant theoretical and policy implications. |
| Keywords: | cultural diversity, immigration, industrial structure, innovation, knowledge spillovers |
| JEL: | J23 M21 |
| Date: | 2025–11–26 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:stc:stcp8e:20250110003e |
| By: | Estrin, Saul; Nachum, Lilac; Hu, Yuan |
| Abstract: | Extant research offers inconclusive evidence on how firms’ export modes affect learning and innovation. Drawing on a Penrosian perspective, we argue that simultaneously pursuing direct and indirect exporting generates complementarities, as excess resources and experiential knowledge developed in one mode can be redeployed in the other. As a result, the combined export strategy yields stronger learning and innovation outcomes than either strategy pursued alone. We further theorize that these benefits depend on firm‑level resources and the characteristics of the learning environment. Using data on more than 4, 000 African exporters from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, we find robust evidence that firms combining direct and indirect exporting modes innovate more than single‑mode exporters across multiple specifications and estimation techniques. The African context allows us to highlight how institutional and resource constraints shape learning through exporting. |
| Keywords: | direct and indirect exporting simultaneously; learning; innovation; theory of the growth of the firm; African firms; emerging market firms |
| JEL: | J50 |
| Date: | 2026–05–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138306 |
| By: | Cervellati, Matteo; Lazzaroni, Sara; Marciante, Gianni; Masella, Paolo |
| Abstract: | The roots of sustained growth in England are increasingly located in the period from the Scientific Revolution to the Age of the Enlightenment. Productivity increases have been suggestively linked to the development of communication infrastructures and the diffusion of useful knowledge. In this paper, we isolate the empirical impact of the evolution of the postal system in England and Wales over the period 1570-1769 on interpersonal communication exchanges in the context of the Republic of Letters. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment due to a postal system reform leading to the opening of the pre-existing network to the public in 1635. We build a novel geo-referenced database involving about 56, 000 letters by roughly 9, 000 correspondents. Using difference-in-differences, we show that the reform led to a substantial increase in interpersonal communications. The main findings are confirmed by event-study analyses and an instrumental-variables strategy, bolstering confidence in a causal interpretation of our estimates. Looking at the patterns of interactions, we detect a sizable intensification of communications between scholars and professionals. We collect the content of around 30, 000 letters, classify their topics exploiting unsupervised text analysis, and detect a sizable impact of the reform on the evolution of communications related to useful knowledge. Finally, drawing on biographical data, we document the effects on innovation activities. Taken together, the findings provide the first systematic evidence of the role of the postal system for the rise of the Knowledge Economy in England on its way to the Industrial Revolution in the early modern period. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21550 |