The purpose of this paper is to show why to build ‘learning organisations’ must be a central element of knowledge management. The paper argues that the wide use of information technology has a contradictory impact on knowledge management. On the one hand it extends the potential for...

The paper is concerned with spatial clustering of economic activity and its relation to the spatiality of knowledge creation in various sorts of interactive learning processes. It questions the merit of the prevailing explanatory model where the realm of tacit knowledge transfer is confined to...

This paper contributes with two new findings to the literature on how universities contribute to industrial development. First, it argues and substantiates quantitatively through logistic regression models that introduction of academically skilled graduates in small, know-how-based firms can be...

This paper is a slightly revised version of Bengt-Åke Lundvall's Inaugural Lecture, the 10th of November at Department for Business Studies, Aalborg University. The general message is that the growing frequency of so-called paradoxes in economic theory and of unsolved socioeconomic problems...

Despite the diffusion of communication tools and boundary spanning technologies, knowledge flows in innovation processes retain a distinct localized nature in many industries and geographical clusters emerge as critical areas to foster technological diffusion. In this paper we focus on the role...

In this paper, we argue that together with individual inventors and firms, what Robert C. Allen (1983) has termed as collective invention settings (that is settings in which rival firms freely release each other pertinent technical information), were also a crucial source of innovation in the...

This paper draws upon a questionnaire survey, conducted 1996 in 1900 Danish Firms, on technical and organisational change. The topics in the survey were among others if firms been through significant organizational change, how the firm had developed its human resources, and what were the motives...

The new economic scenario increases the importance of the "innovative capacity" of the agents as crucial competitive instrument in order to attain the differentiating element required by the competitive process. Innovative capacity refers to the agents' capability to transform general knowledge...

The paper investigates the relationship between human capital characteristics and firm performance in engineering consulting. Because general experience, firm-specific human capital and diversity carry specific costs and benefits we hypothesize curvilinear (taking inverted U-shapes) relations to...

It is increasingly realized that knowledge is the most important resource and that learning is the most important process in the economy. Sometimes this is expressed by coining the current era as characterised by a ‘knowledge based economy’. But this concept might be misleading by indicating...