I wrote this a couple of days after the conference in question, but just saved rather than published it, to look up something. I forget what, so thought I’d just publish it as is.

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One of many thoughts at Alice Bell’s excellent Popular Science Day 2008 conference was that I was experiencing knowledge transfer in action, in the humanities.

I’m trying to write this in a way that makes me not sound stupid, and will probably fail. But bear with me.

I was there with my book prize hat on, but with my work with the R&D Society, I think about knowledge transfer a lot – how it should be done, how we translate ‘from ideas to wealth’ (social or fiscal), etc. Even so, it took until, sometime after lunch for me to twig that that the conference was achieving, at least in part.

The conference programme consisted of a range of mainly academic speakers (PhD, postdoc and researcher types), talking about their work and raising questions for discussion with the audience. The audience mixed academics with publishers, prospective and current authors and people like me. And this academic and ‘business’ engagement was very helpful, I think on both sides. I certainly was inspired to reflect on some aspects of my work, contextualise other aspects, and may inspire me to do some aspects of my job better. So why hadn’t I been thinking of the conference in terms of knowledge transfer?

Perhaps its because the traditional framing of academic-business engagement or commercialisation is science and widget based. University knowledge is useful if it results in tangible, countable, point-out-able things – patents, inventions, machines, widgets, stuff. That’s even encapsulated in one of the common alternative names for knowledge transfer – technology transfer. And it seems true that patents, inventions, machines, widgets and stuff do tend to come from the sciences, rather than the arts, and that that is where money can be made – though it’s not the only place, and it is not all about money, money.

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Postscript:

Recent Times Higher stories that reminded me I’d drafted this include AHRC chief tells angry academic entrepreneurialism is no threat to basic research. and Product focus stifles knowledge transmission to commercial world, says CIHE.