Max Boisot

“To summarize, the production of information and its use in transactions both incur costs and are thus subject to economizing. In the 1970s, there occurred a revival of interest among economists in the economics of transaction, and Oliver Williamson in particular, building on the earlier work of Ronald Coase and John Commons, has explored the different institutional arrangements that govern transactional choices.”

“Only firms that can handle a full SLC, together with the multiple cultures required to drive it, will be able to cope with the many and conflicting demands of a complex regime.”

“It makes sense to describe a core competence as a complex adaptive system, located in the lower regions of the I-Space between an ordered regime in which knowledge assets get frozen into technologies and a chaotic regime in which the stability necessary for effective organizational coordination and integration remains absent. Core competences, then, have their being in a region of the I-Space sandwiched between an excess of usable structure and a total lack of it. We hypothesize that the possession of a core competence is one measure of a firm’s ability to deal with complexity.”

“Knowledge is a property of agents predisposing them to act in particular circumstances.”

“Information establishes a relation between things and agents.”

“Data is discrimination between physical states of things (black, white, etc.) that may convey or not convey information to an agent. Whether it does so or not depends on the agent's prior stock of knowledge.”

“[Knowledge assets are] stocks of knowledge through which different value added services flow.”

“Failure to properly conceptualize the nature of knowledge assets condemns firms.”

“The production of information and its use in transactions both incur costs and are thus subject to economizing. In the 1970s, there occurred a revival of interest among economists in the economics of transaction, and Oliver Williamson in particular, building on the earlier work of Ronald Coase and John Commons, has explored the different institutional arrangements that govern transactional choices.”

“Although in practice innovative coding is hard to disentangle from innovative theorizing, the latter, over time, has a far greater impact than the former on how we perceive and interpret the world.”

“The thinking that underpins strategic planning is a legacy of more stable times when the environment was changing sufficiently slowly for an effective corporate response to emerge from methodical organisational routines.”

“Data itself can be thought of as an energetic phenomenon that links us in our capacity as knowing subjects to an external physical world.”

“Knowledge management often generates theories that are too general or abstract to be easily testable. In some cases, simulation modeling can help. [WE have developed] an agent-based simulation model derived from a conceptual framework, the Information Space or I-Space and use it to explore the differences between a neoclassical and a Schumpeterian information environment.”