The Economics of Codification and the Diffusion of Knowledge

Robin Cowan and Dominique Foray

Industrial and Corporate Change, 1997, vol. 6, issue 3, 595-622

Abstract: The process by which knowledge or information evolves and spreads through the economy evolves changing its nature between tacit and codified forms. The process of codification includes three aspects: model building, language creation and the writing of messages. Recent technical changes in several technologies have impinged on these three activities and changed the costs and benefits from each of them, generally lowering the costs of codification. Technical changes have also facilitated the diffusion of codified knowledge, which has increased its value. Due to the temporal relations among the three aspects of codification, the ongoing process in which codification takes place may be path-dependent. Copyright 1997 by Oxford University Press.

Date: 1997
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