This paper explores the nature of governance both within and by blockchains and the economies they support. There is a widespread assumption that the proper governance model for these economies is political, i.e., democratic voting. In this paper we make an alternative claim, namely that a more...

Building in web3 isn’t just a technical engineering problem and financing challenge, it is also a problem of entrepreneurial discovery. We propose a new theory of crypto and web3 dynamics drawing on von Hippel and Katz’s (2002) toolkit theory of user innovation. Toolkits are an...

The recent arrival of an innovation supercluster of digital business technologies (web3/ industry 4.0, etc) is driving a deep, global institutional transformation from industrial to digital economies. A digital economy is a new type of economy that is qualitatively different because it is far...

Innovation commons – which we define as repositories of freely-accessible, “open source” innovation-related information and data - are a very significant resource for innovating and innovation-adopting firms and individuals: Availability of free data and information reduces the...

Blockchains are the distributed, decentralised ledger technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We apply Oliver Williamson's transactions cost analysis to the blockchain consensus mechanism. Blockchains reduce the costs of opportunism but are not “trustless”. We show that...

This paper examines how national innovation policies strategically interact to form emergent de facto global innovation policies from the perspective of seven distinct economic models. We consider the case for a global coordinating institute – a World Innovation Organization – to address the...

Commitment voting is a mechanism for signalling intensity of preferences and long-term commitment to governance decisions in proof of stake blockchains. In commitment voting, the voting weight of a vote in any given election is determined by 1) the amount of tokens under a voters control and 2)...

What assets does a firm need to hold to develop a profitable business model? A ‘Hart asset’ is an asset that a firm cannot strategically afford a rival firm to own or control due to the risk of hold up, and therefore must be held within the firm, and upon which a profitable business model...

The evolutionary dynamics of a digital economy are different in important and systematic ways to an industrial economy. We therefore require modified or reconstructed theory and policy. This is the research agenda for evolutionary economics