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.