To the extent that an entity in the Social Economy is operating for altruistic reasons , it is hard to find a justification for keeping intellectual property secret.  If the intellectual property could advance society in some other party’s hands then it should be shared.

The issue of competition was not prompted or raised by the research team but by survey participants themselves. Interestingly, the issue “Competition” was most frequently raised in responses related to “Collaboration and Cooperation”.

In this chapter, we want to draw attention to two principal issues that arose in the study and which we have described as “uneven preoccupations”. The first focuses on the idea of misalignment of interests where interests may be motivated by a sense of self, egoism, and/or described as vested self interests. The second issue we have called the righteous Social Economy. This issue is closely related to the first because it seemed that the expression of righteousness (being upright but also including self-righteousness) we observed among many members in the sector, was also motivated by forms of self interest.