Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue of the Journal of Knowledge Economy is to focus on a number of particular aspects related to the process of knowledge creation, dissemination and its use. This follows largely the ideas developed within the European Union 6th Framework project ‘Understanding the Relationship between Knowledge and Competitiveness in the Enlarging European Union’, better known as the U-Know project. The main goal of the U-Know project was to enhance the understanding of knowledge and its role for economic competitiveness and wider societal development in support of the Lisbon agenda for an enlarging Europe. It focuses on the interaction between enterprises with the higher education and the government sectors in environments characterised by the spread of knowledge. This interaction is governed by factors such as institutional arrangements, organisational conditions, norms and values, attitudes and cognitive flexibility that align the agents into a system of networks. Specific forms of interaction shape different characteristics of knowledge, each of which has its own repercussion on the process of knowledge creation, its dissemination and its use.