Collaboration as economic efficiency

Collaboration has surpassed competition in the new industries. While production needs the pressure of self-improvement, collaboration is far more efficient in knowledge industries. Engineering partnerships in the automobile industry are self-evident with the numerous cross-ownerships of the majors. The computer chip industries also strongly collaborate (Toward the Chips of Tomorrow, BusinessWeek) in order to achieve an industry-wide roadmap that would otherwise be out of financial reach.

The purpose of work turns into a logical decision-making process rather than a strategic one. Science is a self-correcting process that works best with a maximum number of criticism of the solutions evaluated. Research has a much higher return over a long period than production. Since competition drags down research by limiting creativity and evolutionary mechanisms, a reworking of intellectual property laws is clearly needed. Research benefits from the law of accelerating returns and therefore constitutes the only sustainable economic policy.