This volume presents a comprehensive assessment of the economic effects of the emerging information and communication technologies associated with a knowledge-based economy, and looks at how knowledge is increasingly treated as a product in its own right. An original framework is developed to comprehend these fundamental shifts, based on three bodies of knowledge:• the economics of path dependence and of historical time as they are elaborated in the economics of new technologies• economic topology based on the methodology of network analysis• the new economics of knowledge and the concept of localized technological change This book provides a unified analytical framework for the study of the transition of advanced economic systems towards a knowledge-based economy.