The paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Hardin in 1968 highlighted the potential depletion of shared resources due to the self-interested behavior of individuals. This study sparked interest in scholars to understand how individuals make sense of shared resources and how to prevent over-exploitation. Elinor Ostrom challenged the assumption of the rational actor and […]
With the introduction of the third mission concept, universities have been increasingly asked to perform different activities besides teaching and researching, outreaching knowledge outside their boundaries and assuming a leading role in fostering innovation in modern knowledge-intensive societies. However, how do the three academic missions pursued by entrepreneurial universities interact with each other? To what […]
How do people’s beliefs on the likely system-level consequences of circulating a certain piece of knowledge influence those people’s knowledge behaviors? To address this question, we leverage the most recent developments of the theory of the commons as learning systems. According to this theory, people are strongly responsive to perceived threats to the commons they […]
In the current knowledge-based economy, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are called to play different interconnected roles related to triple university missions. Alongside the two traditional missions of teaching and research, HEIs have experienced the emergence of the so-called “third mission”, which sees HEIs as knowledge-based agents part of ecosystems of public institutions, companies and citizens […]