Conceptualizing duality through knowledge architecture and patents
Résumé
Since the 1970s, defence economics has been looking at the interaction between armament and civilian industry. Nevertheless debates have been marred by several biases, resulting from political or ideological preconceptions. This explains why the duality issue has been neglected for a while, despite much significant advancement by knowledge economics.
It is therefore useful to revisit the duality issue. Defining how to analyze interactions between arms production and civilian activities constitutes a prerequisite. This is the reason why one has to analyze not only products or spinoffs, but to go deeper at the patent level. This is required for two main reasons. First duality as a process is difficult to observe and the analysis cannot rely only on few examples. Second one has to consider duality through the lens of technical systems as a structuring dimension of understanding inter-sectors interactions.
Such an analytical framework provides an innovative approach of duality, since it can help understand duality through interaction between pieces of knowledge: linkages between patents and patent families become the means to reveal not only the existence of duality but also the depth of such interactions at different levels of given technical systems. The proposed paper will then propose à renewed approach of duality and how to assess it.