Innovations and protection of property rights in the era of radical economic transformations

Formation of the ecosystem of knowledge economy assumes creation of necessary institutional conditions. The most important elements of these conditions are property rights and mechanisms of their security. The paper discusses the questions of formation of institutional prerequisites of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and claims that the evolution of property land rights (land during a pre-industrial era was the basic common resource) provided exclusivity of the rights of large landowners. It also shows the importance in this process of the English educated and ruling class with its ideological and moral traditions, which were marked by the emphasis on individualism and subjectivity. It is concluded that one needs to carefully treat the recommendations based on the experience of the Industrial Revolution. In the knowledge economy, the efficient use of common resources (the main of them being information) for creating innovations involves the development of the distributed property rights system and its protection.