New knowledge with potential commercial value is created, replicated, and transferred in a distributed manner. The highly systemic nature of knowledge production and the need for any knowledge to be individually acquired and expressed in order to produce an effect, jointly constrain the dynamics...

To produce an effect, knowledge needs to be first acquired and expressed by a human agent. This trivial fact is a constraint on knowledge commercialization. The highly systemic nature of the decentralized production of knowledge is another constraint. This paper analyses the nature of the two...

The paper argues that studies of the social role of basic research and its contribution to innovation and technological development in the commercial sector tend to overemphasise the propositional knowledge it produces. Differentiating this propositional knowledge from underlying, generic...