Building on Knowledge Developing Expertise, Creativity and Intellectual Capital in the Construction Professions

Abstract

My interest in knowledge began over 25 years ago when I was respon sible for directing the UK’s national programme of research on solar energy. As results started to roll in it became clear that, though some of the ideas belonged to the future, others deserved to be taken up immediately: they could make buildings cheaper to run and nicer to live and work in, without costing anything. Only the designs would need to change. We published the research reports, but we soon found that hardly anybody in the construction industry reads research reports. How could we get these new ideas across to them? How, indeed, did knowledge in general fl ow from research into practice? When I looked into past innovations, I found that it could take up to 20 years for new ideas to spread throughout a whole industry (and construction was not uniquely slow). I did not want to wait that long. Even after new ideas reached one part of a company they often took a long time to become common knowledge. How could I speed up the process? I became fascinated by knowledge and how it fl ows around, between organisations and inside them. I discovered a lot about how ideas emerge and practical know-how develops; that some kinds of knowledge can be communicated easily in writing, some only with diffi culty, and some not at all; the importance of tacit knowledge (but I had not read Polanyi’s book, so I did not know there was a name for it) and the special magic of face-to-face knowledge transfer; and many other things. And this mysterious stuff called knowledge has been part of my professional life ever since.