The knowledge industry

A question I always hate being asked is “What do you do for a living?” Depending on mood, my answers range from “I search for the Elixir of Perpetual Youth” to “I work in a hospital.” But having completed my first year (part-time) at business school, I now have a much better answer: I work in the knowledge industry. Laboratories are the factories of the knowledge industry. They receive inputs — funding, departmental infrastructure and disposable postdocs — which they transform into knowledge, sometimes called intellectual property. Like real estate property, the three most important attributes are position, position, position; where you locate your intellectual property can have a big impact on its future value. Most scientists would agree that a piece of knowledge that enables one to nail a jellyfish to the ceiling is worth less than one that provides a therapy for cancer, baldness and smelly feet. But often the comparison is less dramatic, so a variety of methods have been devised to measure how many units of knowledge a particular factory or industry worker produces. Although we do not have a precise definition of a unit of knowledge, an approximation can be determined by multiplying a matrix of publications by a matrix of citation ratings and dividing the product by the inverse of author position (and subtracting the average shoe size). Thus providers of input determine the efficiency with which factories convert dollars and postdocs into units of knowledge. Once we make units of knowledge, we then have to sell them, and this is where the marketing aspect of our industry comes into play. The first people we need to sell our units to are the editors of scientific journals. As we all know, they can be very reluctant customers, particularly when the peer review process results in competing factories acting as consultants for the purchase decision. But it is through the process of publication that the number of units of knowledge contained in a piece of intellectual property is determined. Thus, a piece of intellectual property published in Nature or Current Biology is considered to contain more units of knowledge than one published in the Journal of Jellyfish Carpentry.