KNOWLEDGE AND INNOVATION: PROMOTING A SYSTEM APPROACH OF INNOVATION PROCESSES

This contribution intends to clarify for the current discussion about knowledge and its importance within economic systems. It relies on the complementary character of the economics of knowledge of Marshall and Hayek. One of them is useful to discuss opportunities and limits of the so-called resource-based theory of the firm in order to deal with the relationship between the governance of knowledge and firms' innovative behaviours; the other is useful to insist on the importance of knowledge channelled by and within market dynamics. As a consequence, their combination allows one to pave better grounds to current knowledge economic importance by exploring in-depth characteristics of knowledge, expressing the need to deal with the governance of technological knowledge, and promoting the localized and distributed characters of firms' innovative behaviours. This finally leads to promote an innovation-system approach based on that localized character of innovative behaviours of firms in order to depict proper use made by firms in matters of knowledge generation, use, dissemination, and trade.