Abstract

Knowledge creation in the twenty-first century is a collaborative and ubiquitous enterprise. It takes place in environments that are markedly shifting from traditional, hierarchical structures towards new, lateral and networked structures. This shift produces a variety of frictions and tensions between established ways of knowledge creation and new emergent knowledge creation modes. These frictions can be thought of as the indicators of an imminent industrial revolution catalysed by digital technologies, and favouring services over goods. Today’s technologies are complex and require the collaboration of many to produce machines that include both digital and physical components where both software and hardware are integral parts of sophisticated systems. The development of these systems takes place in institutional contexts which were not necessarily designed for collaboration. In particular, intellectual property rights were not conceived to handle collaborative intellectual assets. While open source methodology has long been established in software, for hardware it is new. Most of today's legacy of intellectual property treaties and laws come from an era before digital technologies were invented and which did not envisage a broader class of intellectual assets that can accommodate the integration of digital and physical components. This proprietary legacy regime is glaringly ill-suited to the task of transmitting information about the knowledge pertaining to systems developed in collaboration, and it is not very helpful as legal titles for the commercialization of such integrated systems. In the future, as a result of the shift to more integration and a