As you sit at your PC typing away, looking up details on the Internet, sending and receiving emails to and from clients and colleagues, you could be forgiven for thinking we don’t need personal contact to do business anymore.
But while these technological advances have changed the way we work irrevocably, they are no substitute for person-to-person transactions.
The Information Age has been a boon for the transmission of data and other information. You can go online and research something in detail. There is now a wealth of material at your fingertips. But this process does not necessarily translate into knowledge.
Knowledge is the use of data and information for an outcome. And interestingly, in the literature that we’ve been working through for Pracsys clients, knowledge still very much requires human interaction.
If knowledge were a person-less transaction then you wouldn’t need physical university sites. Everything could be done via the Internet and everyone could learn at their own pace.
But there are certain efficiencies in a physical entity that brings people together. And unexpected knowledge spillovers occur when you have concentrations of certain groups of people discussing problems and transfering their knowhow.
This is the basis for a new type of infrastructure, the post Industrial Age, post Information Age infrastructure – knowledge infrastructure for the Knowledge Age.
This is infrastructure that assists people to come together to exchange knowledge for commercial reasons, not just for its own sake. To take significant problems, such as a cure for cancer or viable renewable energy, and come up with solutions.
Knowledge transfers occur not over the celebrated Information Highway, but when you get people from different backgrounds together in physical locations where they can discuss solutions to these big problems.
If you want to go online and find out specific information or access experts in a particular area you can go to a forum and post a question, participate in a discussion or observe a discussion. And that’s about as close as you get to knowledge transfer without physical contact.
What is clear is that physical contact actually accelerates the innovation and discovery process.
If you enter an economics forum on the Internet you get economists coming together who are more concerned with refuting the arguments that others are making. And that has a place. Similarly, if you go to a chemistry or physics forum, you don’t find a bunch of economists hanging out there. Like attracts like in the World Wide Web.
But what you get with universities, or any other research and development knowledge transfer physical entity, is a real mixture of backgrounds – technical, non-technical, financial, non-financial etc. And what we find is that this mix of skills often brings about a solution more effectively than a group of, say, economists ever could on its own.
The reason for this is – and this is the intangible thing – is that knowledge spillovers from one area to the another occur not in linear ways, but in unexpected ways.
The Knowledge Age requires different types of infrastructure to the Information Age. If our policy makers don’t get their heads around the sort of infrastructure – something they currently term “soft infrastructure” for want of a better description – required to bring the necessary groups of people together, the crucial transfer of knowledge simply won’t happen.
