About Innovation Commons

The term “innovation commons” describes a specific kind of governance institution — one designed to incentivise cooperation around the messy, distributed process of turning ideas into economic reality.

It is not a metaphor. It is a formal concept in innovation economics, developed to explain how groups of people pool information, knowledge, and resources to discover entrepreneurial opportunities that none of them could have found alone.

“An innovation commons is a governance institution to incentivize cooperation in order to pool distributed information, knowledge, and other inputs into innovation to facilitate the entrepreneurial discovery of an economic opportunity. In other words, the true origin of innovation is not entrepreneurial action per se, but the creation of a common-pool resource from which entrepreneurs can discover opportunities.”

— Jason Potts, Innovation Commons: The Origin of Economic Growth (2019)

The insight is structural: innovation does not begin with the entrepreneur. It begins with the commons — the shared informational environment that makes entrepreneurial discovery possible in the first place. The entrepreneur acts, but the commons enables.

“The ‘innovation commons’ alleviates uncertainty around a nascent technology by pooling distributed information about uses, costs, problems and opportunities.”

— Darcy W.E. Allen & Jason Potts, “How innovation commons contribute to discovering and developing new technologies” (2016)

This matters because it reframes the policy question. Instead of asking “how do we produce more entrepreneurs?” the right question becomes “how do we build the institutional conditions — the commons — from which entrepreneurial discovery naturally emerges?”

That is the question this publication takes seriously.

Innovation Commons Australia is an independent newsletter exploring innovation economics, institutional design, and the policies shaping Australia's economic future.

We write for people who think seriously about how innovation actually works — not the Silicon Valley mythology of lone founders, but the deeper institutional, material, and political conditions that determine whether a society innovates or stagnates.

Topics include: neo-Schumpeterian economics, institutional theory, material history, Australian industrial and science policy, indigenous innovation, and the governance of emerging technologies.