Knowledge-based economies and information and technologies

This paper builds a bridge between bodies of research on 'knowledge-based' societies and on the information and communication technology revolution by highlighting the distinctions between information and knowledge. Economics has traditionally explicitly ignored these distinctions in order to focus on the unique qualities of information as an economic commodity. This approach has several shortcomings including: (1) reducing knowledge acquisition, i.e. learning, to the receipt of information, (2) ignoring analysis of technologies for representing knowledge, and (3) failure to consider the role of social networks in exchanging knowledge. Addressing these issues will require new theories of industrial structure based upon the sustained exchange of knowledge and new approaches to public research. The new communication technologies, especially the Internet, raise specific questions about pricing as an incentive mechanism for governing access to information resources. In sum, the paper concludes that a new policy-oriented research agenda is needed that centres on issues of access, standardisation and investment in social and physical network infrastructures. This new research agenda largely replaces a traditional agenda whose principal concerns were pricing in and corporate governance of monopolistic telecommunication networks.