Knowledge eyes: Nature and emergence in society, culture, and economy

New approaches are required to guide social and economic systems in a context presenting a deep change in the meaning of value and in ways to generate it. Until now, policies and strategies, at macro as well as microeconomic level, have focused on closed systems (the great “containers” of the industrial era), and on profits coming from the exchange of goods and services. Nonetheless, the growing misalignment between values on financial markets and volume of turnovers, clearly observed in the web companies, shows that important assets can be created through new dynamics (i.e. the number of relationships of a social network service). The fast digitalization of society suggests a next extension of this dynamics to the whole economy, or much of it. These developments are consistent with the vision of a sustainable prosperity of socioeconomic system based upon knowledge, but our society is not aware of conditions and factors enabling its generation and exploitation. Knowledge is an open, complex system, as well as the networks where it is created. Therefore, we should shift our focus from traditional, closed organizations to the emerging “knowledge hubs” there is a wide array of them, and a lot to understand about how they could behave. This paper deals with these hubs, or nodes, and the way to accelerate their emergence and to increase their generative potential overall their potential. We call these cognitive superhubs “Knowledge Eyes”, not only for their eidetic ability, but also for their capability of gather progressively more and more energy moving in open environments (as “cyclone eyes”). Experiences of global and local knowledge systems are shortly described, with the goal of a better understanding of their formation, exploitation and governance in our transitional age.