The inspiration for this volume is Simon Deakin’s proposal to think of the corporation as a shared resource which is collectively held and managed for the benefit of multiple interests. A small but fascinating recent literature extended this insight to mutuals, cooperatives, and benefit corporations, while an independent literature applied a similar line of Ostromian thinking to inter alia cities, land trusts, civil society organization, and certain kinds of platforms. All these studies noted the importance of shared knowledge, but none deployed the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework. What this volume attempts to do is to steer the discussion toward this unifying framework. This chapter introduces the contributions, which despite their diversity engage with the idea that corporations and ecosystems comprising corporate actors cohere around shared knowledge, values, and other kinds of intellectual or cognitive resources, the sustainable production and reproduction of which depends on specific practices and rule configurations.

The player explores the history of professional unions in tennis up to the current day. It starts by setting out the dual and shifting roles of tennis player unions, which at all times of its history ranged from a collective action to shared governance. It goes on to ponder what actually is a professional tennis players’ union and lays out a framework for the trade union rights of professional tennis players. Its historical account throws light at initial attempts at player unionization and the pivotal role of player unionization in 1967–75. This led to pro tennis’s labor settlement – business in lieu of bargaining, which in turn culminated in the so-called “Seven Kingdoms” – player voice, rights, pay and conditions in professional tennis, which is the current status. The chapter explores these seven kingdoms and the latest development with the PTPA, which was established in 2020.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) has achieved regional and national prominence in the US for its remarkable success preparing African American students in the STEM fields. The success is the result of the institution’s approach to innovation - framing challenges as researchable questions and testing to see which strategies work and replicating them. It has fostered a culture of curiosity and mutual support that makes the pursuit of excellence an ongoing collective effort.

Concepts of labor and democracy have infused the theory and practice of higher education in the USA since the development of the modern university in the late 1800s and the early 1900s.Higher education’s social role in promoting the common good in a democratic society is linked to its internal labor model that provides faculty with academic freedom and collective self-governance. These are contested institutional goals and structures, however, in tension with the competing use of higher education to serve the private interests of industry. This chapter explores the ongoing push-pull between private economic interests, on the one hand, and higher education’s contribution to wider democratic political culture and its correlative internal commitment to its faculties’ academic freedom, tenure, and rights to govern jointly with administrators, on the other.

We discuss the factors influencing the relationship between government policy-makers and scientists and how they affect the use of science in policy. We highlight issues related to context, values, culture, timeframes, communication and interpersonal relationships, providing insights from policy-makers and scientists. A spectrum of working strategies is given with examples of practical mechanisms that improve the effective use of science in policy. The shared governance model is a relatively mature approach with the potential to overcome many of the barriers discussed. At its core, shared governance, or co-production, invites policy-makers and scientists to develop and manage research priorities collaboratively. We explore the primary features of a successful shared governance arrangement, exemplified by the collaborative working model between the Australian Government Department of Agriculture and the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis. We conclude by outlining the advantages and disadvantages of the co-production of research priorities by scientists and policy-makers and present the learnings from its implementation in the biosecurity sector in Australia.