On the civic role of firms in emerging ecologies of value

Knowledge is the main competitive assets in today economy. This resource, differently from the others firms have traditionally managed, increases its value through sharing and diffusing. Adoption, in fact, does not only contribute to increase its trustworthiness, but also to broadening its scope and application. The development of global digital infrastructures such as Internet has even enhanced the potential advantages that may derive from sharing knowledge. In this paper the development of ecologies of value, context of knowledge sharing where parties partecipate to the production of a collective value, is presented as alternative strategy to protecting the value of knowledge through intellectual property right. Being able to leverage on the potential disclosed by collective interaction in ecology of values requires participants not exploiting open accessibility to their own advantage. This calls for the emergence of a new ethic. An ethic of the abundance, where people develop a complete consciousness of the potential deriving from sharing knowledge for their own success and happiness. The role of firms in emerging ecologies of value is to promote the development of such an ethic by setting up context of interaction that are open, based on tolerance and mutual transparency