Technology Transfer
It is now widely used as a meaning of managing technical know-how and intellectual property management, involving inventions and patents, licensing, marketing an industrial application of a certain technical solution (in essence: an invention, its industrial application, its market).
Landscaping the state of art in patents and technical models concerning your project is of great help to allow you to take your next steps: patenting, licensing, marketing. This can be achieved with structured and reasoned searches in the relevant areas.
Taking contacts and developing networks with potential partners and developers is also important for your project to achieve and consolidate success. No technical solution is usually for good in its final form (with some exception, usually some technical masterpiece…). This means that sharing views and acquiring new suggestions brings more potential solutions (which usually come from finding, or even seeking more problems…), that can derive from your project. Therefore Technology Transfer does not only involve searching and screening technical scientific information, but it also involves contacting other people, enterprises, firms, and exchanging views and exploring opportunities, for marketing, funding, financing, etc.
Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge Transfer has a wider meaning, in part related to, and comprising, technology transfer. But it has indeed the more fascinating aspect of reaching much wider areas of intellectual activity and stretching among the most distant ones. It is the management of specific information in order to allow it to move among different compartments of knowledge, so that the shared information may offer wider opportunities to problem solutions to each field involved. A Transfer of knowledge therefore always brings along a transfer of culture. In any working organisational structure, different compartments have their own corpus of knowledge, their own literature, which they acquire, express and develop using their own language, following a specific pathway of education and studies.
The more specific is the language of a given field, the more arduous is the work of transferring its knowledge to other fields. Science and Technology are a good example when they need to provide knowledge to non-scientific, non-technological areas: Arts, Philosophy, Education, Law etc.
As any decently good translator knows, you need to know both the source and the acceptor language (or culture), in order to transfer information efficiently from one to the other. No scientific knowledge will be of any use if you don’t know where to find the essential information for your needs, nor how to convey it to your target (audience, readers, collaborators, students).
The modern resources of information (eminently the world wide web) provide virtually access to all possible information one might ever need for any kind of project. Mostly for free. But the trillions of data “available” every day still need to be searched, screened and understood, before being chosen and finally acquired to be put to use for our scope.
TERRÆ INCOGNITÆ 