FROM THE SOURCE TO THE MAINSTREAM IS UPHILL: The Challenge of Transferring Knowledge of Crime Prevention Through Replication, Innovation and Anticipation

Knowledge, in combination with pragmatic, cultural, organisational and conceptual factors, determines the performance of practitioners such as police, local government community safety officers and product designers. This paper addresses the serious and widespread obstacles to the transfer and application of knowledge generated by professional criminological research, development and evaluation, to the mainstream of practice in the overlapping fields of crime prevention and problem-oriented policing. The emphasis is on those obstacles inherent in the nature and form of knowledge itself. It therefore relates contentfree concepts of knowledge management to content-rich considerations of the particular qualities of crime prevention knowledge and how it is applied in practice. It covers key issues of replication, innovation, and anticipation through, for example, foresight activities. It draws on ideas from design, evolutionary epistemology, memetics, more conventional anthropological views of cultural transmission and evolution, and organisational research on diffusion of innovation. The aim is to open up new ways of thinking centring on "genotypic" principles of prevention that apply across contexts and across time — which can provide the foundations for practical suggestions for training, guidance and design of knowledge bases. So many, and diverse, connections emerge to the Crime Prevention Studies, volume 13, pp. 131-203.