The Linear Model of innovation proposes that knowledge moves from basic research to applied research to development of product to commercial implementation. This model arises in economic accounts of early NSF reporting, is implemented by the US FARs in their account of research, is used by US export control and ITAR to differentiate fundamental research from other work, and is used as a justification for the importance of university research. A great account of the origin of the Linear Model is here. A illustrative listing of definitions of basic research is here.
The Linear Model also forms the basis for the development of the Little Linear Model. The Little Linear Model is how university technology transfer offices situate themselves within the cocoon of rhetoric over the Linear Model. The Little Linear Model sets itself up to be the mechanism of choice for the movement of inventions in basic and applied research to development and commercial distribution. It sets up as a crucial step in the process. If you accept the Linear Model, then you just gotta accept that there has to be a step from applied research (or proof of concept, or prototype development) to development and commercialization. If your goal is commercialization, then you gotta work the step from applied research to development. If there’s no funds there, it’s a funding gap.
Folks would rather blame the world and try impossible things than change out their heuristics. That’s because the Linear Model is no heuristic. It is a believe system. It is the way the world *really is*. It makes so much sense. How could there be any other pathway than from research discovery to folks that do things with those discoveries, develop them, create products. There it is, it just *has to be that way*.
Sadly, no.
There was a time when it was an open debate whether industry needed science at all to develop product. Yeah, 100 years ago and all. But it was quite the discussion at the time, in the great new industry labs built by Edison and Westinghouse, among others. Do you start with science and futz your way through to something useful? Or do you start with something useful and when you can’t figure out why it works or how to make it more useful, you ask some scientists to get involved, as a last resort?
Or is there some other thing, where stuff comes together in combinations from various sources and something new arises, more like an epiphany than anything a researcher slaves over in a lab. It may be that every discovery worth anything is a lurch sideways from the apparent goal. If that were the case, then what one wanted was a disruption from the norm. Accidents, distractions, meeting new people. In that case, then putting development people with science people is not so much to hand off the wisdom of science as it is to irritate the scientists into lurching sideways and doing something unexpectedly useful.
We may even poo-poo the concept of knowledge flowing. Oh, yes, there are publications and presentations. But the stuff I can fully describe and contain in an article isn’t all that interesting. The stuff that matters is the stuff where I get right to the edge of it, point something out, and you get a glimmering I can’t tell what in which you realize something. My point and your realization need not be the same thing. So much the better and let’s hope not.
Call it engagement. Call it the behaviors we have when we sense we are close to something, and discover shards of it collectively, in a distributed fashion. The “it” that matters, we struggle to describe. The “it” we have got, little factoids and potential factoids, and claims and assertions and aspirations–all that is a symptom. The knowledge arises without being transmitted. What is transmitted is markers that ascertain that there’s mutual recognition. No “knowledge flow” at all. If you get close enough to something, you see it and others see it and the joy of it is that the *interpretations* of it vary but folks get what they are all on to.
In its basic formulation, that’s what translational research aims to do. Duplex communication between theory and clinic. Not one-way flow. But it is so hard to tell any story of it, because once something happens, the conditions of narrative make something move. If you don’t have movement, then it’s darn hard for it to be a story and it becomes something else, like a financial table or a statistical chart. You know, abstract and frozen. Bear scat, but not the bear.
If research discovery is about lurches sideways, and if discovery itself is something that happens in common, as a manifold, an all-that-and-more rather than as a singularity, a big-it, then there is no flow of knowledge in that activity. There is an in-welling, an epiphany, a self-construction.
In that case, perhaps if I see something my goal is *not to transfer it* to you, but to lead you to a position where you *see it for yourself*. That is, I don’t somehow stuff what I see into your brainbox, but rather that your brainbox does some extraordinary work and has something it didn’t have before. But you didn’t get it from me. You have some other it. When our its get together, then it’s some sort of strange and crazy pronoun party.
I can demonstrate how this process works to break non-disclosure agreements pertaining to new technology without violating their terms. That’s because non-disclosure based disclosure depends on a linear model of one party having some commodity information and another party gaining access to it and agreeing not to pass it on or use it except in authorized ways. But if what matters is recognition, interpretation, and epiphany, then there are all sorts of ways to get at it that don’t involve access to the information.
The Little Linear Model then takes up transformations of information and rights in basic and applied research and sets up to promote, broker, and guard the transformation of this stuff into development settings. The Little Linear Model does not comprehend stuff going the other way, nor stuff that does not ever make the jump because it does not have any regard for the heuristic. That is, the research does not self-classify as basic or applied or development, and therefore could not possibly fit a pre-conceived set of categories.
I know, I am asking you to work without all that nomothetic baggage. There are still patents and licenses. But a license could be granted before someone even knows they might need it. And a patent could be obtained to help move an industry idea into a research setting.
I pointed out in a recent post that once you have an event, you can build a story that has a linear flow. It starts with invention and moves through development and crisis to success. It is beautiful. I love narrative. I also pointed out in that post that it doesn’t work so well the other way. By reading such a beautiful story, one does not launch out to imitate all those details of the story (except the crisis, perhaps) to also be successful. Because we tell beautiful stories of inventions becoming successes, we do not necessarily gain anything by trying to imitate the stories. We end up imitating the wrong things, and we miss the details that were left out–and even suppress them as inefficient.
The pattern of narrative is addictive. Once we have a frame, many things fall into place within it. This happens with sacred text. It also happens with political party systems. It happens with scientific theory. And it happens in that little nook of life called technology transfer.
How do we counter all this? One way is to tell lots of stories, different stories, and provide multiple, even competing ways of situating our experiences. Another is to dismantle stories and evaluate the evidence we have for them–finding other details left out or suppressed or ambiguous. From that we gain a reinforcing doubt that separates the truth of the story from its evidentiary necessities. That is, the story may carry moral value, and even memory value, but we don’t mistake it for the thing in the world. The sphere is not the earth. The patent is not the technology. The Linear Model is not how products are created from research, and it’s not how products are created, whether there’s research or not.
If you see what I mean by the “not” then we are on the same page.