Bridging the Private -- Public Sector Gap in S&T

Robert Mann writes:  "David Moorman states "the knowledge created by university and college researchers is not being used by companies to the degree that it could, or should, be". Agreed -- but why?"

The precondition for industries using academic knowledge is that the industries should employ people who know how to obtain this knowledge.  Some do and some do not employ such people.

The response to Moorman's challenge seems to be that particular firms seek to apply the knowledge that they judge relevant to the firms' plans (specific or general), and ignore the rest of academic knowledge as irrelevant.  This is a norm obviously independent of any piece of knowledge's importance within its discipline (and independent of the cost of its creation.)   Ignoring the irrelevant is normal even within the university.   Researchers in biology ignore reaction chemistry most of the time because they believe they can recognize if and when they need it, and then proceed to acquire and employ such knowledge.  Astronomers ignore most or all of biological knowledge, and may be expected to go on ignoring biology.

More fruitful for policy seem to be such case studies as UMIST specialized in, that seek to measure exactly what types of academic knowledge were either essential or useful to carry (selected, specially important) IRD or technology projects through to success.  Empirical inquiries have not yet thrown up any "economics of knowledge," or measures of the utility of academic knowledge in commercial applications, or industry's cost to collect and apply it:  so we do not know whether this can be accounted for like components in a factory or must be funded on the same basis as salesmen are stimulated or provided incentives.   We can tell that some firms seem better at using knowledge than their competitors:  but no one has yet reduced this to a replicable calculus, and only a very few firms demonstrate such excellence continuously for 20 years or more:  so that we do not yet know that the primacy of Northern Electric or Research in Motion owed more to marketing or production economies or the application of academic knowledge or the managerial ability to co-ordinate such activities simultaneously.

The field remains difficult to study because non-users of academic knowledge cannot be analysed in the terms we find valuable to explain the uses of knowledge.  It is certainly possible that there was or is a "gap" between the corporate users of S&T knowledge and the knowledge resources accumulated by governments and academe, as many investigators believe likely:  but no one has yet succeeded in locating this gap or measuring its width in units used for any other purpose.

But such location or measure is not prerequisite for plausible action.   C.J. Mackenzie and C.D. Howe knew much less in 1945 about the supposed gap than science policy knows today, but this did not inhibit their plans for a 250-man Technical Information Service to push public knowledge into the hands of private users.  They scaled down these plans only when they agreed the manifest demand was much less than they expected.  Attempts to bridge the gap have a continuous history of at least a century in Canada, from McGill's earliest relations with the chemicals industries to such institutions as the Alberta Research Council.  These can advise from their long experience, provided only that it has not been forgotten or their archives scrapped.