The Forgotten Knowledge Transfer

The growth of the world’s economy depends on knowledge creation; an aspect that allows innovation. Universities create, store, transmit knowledge, and conduct PhD research programs which are innovative. Although most of this knowledge is well stored, it is not transmitted, developed further, and sometimes not reused. Similarly, UK SMEs are said to be the innovation champions, but most SMEs’ ideas are not developed to a marketable product. Both the researchers and SMEs face various problems such as financial constraints, lack of skills, knowledge, support and trust. This paper highlights the need to manage knowledge creation and its outputs so as to raise innovation levels in the UK. The method used in the paper is not the ‘pseudo-scientific’ (in the context of social sciences) model of theory, hypotheses, empirical results and conclusions but the far older method of collecting and probing observations with the intent of generating discourse and debate.