Conclusions

This book’s aim is to provide a fresh insight on the knowledge economy and its driving forces. The book has demonstrated that there is a widening discrepancy between the way mainstream economics understands the relationships between knowledge and creativity, and the step(s) the typical enterprise exposed to the global market is taking to deal with them. Whilst mainstream economics continues to cling firmly to a logical-positivist notion of knowledge, enterprise is experiencing a cognitive turn under the pressure to provide ceaseless innovation in an increasingly competitive market. From being the alleged champion of modernity, enterprise is, somewhat surprisingly, becoming the laboratory inside which this cognitive turn is finally entering the social fabric, after being long confined to the philosophical, aesthetical and literary debate. The time thus seems to have come to scrutinise the above-mentioned discrepancy: how it has arisen, what consequences follow in the theoretical and the pragmatic domains, and on what conditions it can eventually be repaired. This is the rationale on which this book is based. These concluding pages are devoted to offering a provisional assessment of such an approach with respect, first, to the ongoing theoretical debate and observable facts and, second, with respect to its explanatory power, its interdisciplinary potential, and its ability to help in practice. Assessments are carried out on four levels: the epistemological level, which is concerned with how beliefs and especially pitfalls form in the way(s) we (the authors, in this connection) look at ‘reality’; the heuristic level, which pertains to the internal consistency and explicative power of theories concerning how ‘reality’ works; the methodological level, which deals with procedures to assess the reliability of those theories and, finally, the normative level, on which theoretical developments are applied on policy level.