Breen, Liz

McIntosh, Bryan

Bradford Scholars

The University of Bradford Institutional Repository http://bradscholars.brad.ac.uk This work is made available online in accordance with publisher policies. Please refer to the repository record for this item and our Policy Document available from the repository home page for further information. To see the final version of this work please visit the publisher’s website. Access to the published online version may require a subscription. Link to publisher version: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/getEditorial.php?articleID=5010Citation: Breen L and McIntosh B (2016) Editorial. Special issue on Knowledge Transfer and Its Impact on Commercial Processes. International Journal of Technology Transfer and Communication.  14(3-4): 215-217.Copyright statement: © 2016 Inderscience Publishers. Full-text reproduced in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Editorial       Bryan McIntosh and Liz Breen University of Bradford, Richmond Road, Bradford, BD7 1DP, UK  b.mcintosh1@bradford.ac.uk   l.breen@bradford.ac.uk  Biographical notes: Bryan McIntosh is the Associate Dean at the Faculty of Health Studies at the University of Bradford. He has worked in central government, the NHS, local government and at various academic institutions within the UK. These include Edinburgh Napier, University of Westminster, University of Surrey, University of Greenwich and King’s College London. He is the Consultant Editor of the British Journal of Healthcare Management dealing directly with commissioning and content. He has an extensive publication record in peer reviewed journals and has worked extensively within the field of health management consultancy  Liz Breen is a Senior Lecturer in Operations Management having held previous faculty positions at the Manchester Business School and as a Supply Chain Development Manager at the Central Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. Her research is broadly focused on operational design and improvement particularly within healthcare service supply chains and more specifically the pharmaceutical supply chain. She is part of the founding team of the British Academy of Management (BAM) and BAM Conference 2016 Track Chair for the Special Interest Group on Operations, Logistics and Supply Chain Management. She is keen to develop the profile and relevance of operations and supply chain management in healthcare service supply chains within my research, teaching and business engagement.   Dominant research streams conclude that knowledge transfer and commercial processes are accomplished through congruent instructions and/or socially assembled practices. The papers contained within this special edition focus specifically on the interrelated effects between these relationships and knowledge transfer, through which knowledge exchange is mediated. The paper by Muthukumar et al., ‘Relational investigation: psychological capital with psychological wellbeing and mediating role of organisational citizenship behaviour’, engages with private and cultural models, mediates information into meaningful knowledge. Knowledge is created from the unique combination of cognitive dispositions of acumen, memory, creativity, volition, emotion, and socio-cultural interaction. The model fit indices revealed that the OCB as a mediator has a better fit in explaining the relationship between psychological capital and psychological well-being. It develops further the understanding mechanisms for managerial decision-making, which ultimately affect socio group dynamics and interactions via the working environment. This requires a unique approach to unravel the theoretical complexity presently associated with this topic. This is the case with the Sabourin paper, ‘Biotechnologies: market structuring and competitive strategies’, which notes that, the biotechnology industry has emerged as a vital and dynamic source of new technologies for the pharmaceutical and agricultural chemical industries. The paper examines the strategies of adoption which biotech companies use to obtain market shares. As knowledge is a subjective perspective of an individual’s experience, strategy is inextricably related to the context of the knowledge itself. This paper notes the complex relationship between knowledge transfer processes which emerge to form a strategic perspective which is underpinned by a physical and intellectual infrastructure. This is central to the impact of knowledge transfer. In de Beer and Campbell paper titled, ‘Using Idea 2 Product Labs® as a strategy for accelerating technology transfer’, which engages with the proposition that technology transfer poses particular problems to developing countries whose governments cannot always afford to fund expensive high-tech solution. They indicate that a number of competing strategic viewpoints have emerged regarding the importance of managing organisational knowledge. This is relative in both a commercial and technological context as noted in the Corsi and Prencipe paper: ‘The centrality of university spin-offs within their meso-level network. An assessment of impacts on firm performance’. This paper is an assessment of impacts on firm performance and explores the effects of centrality of university spin-offs (USOs) in their meso-level network on firm performance. The results suggest that degree centrality and betweeness centrality have an effective and positive impact on the USOs performance only in term of natural logarithm of total assets, while closeness centrality seems not to have significant effects on the two performance measures used. This paper acknowledges measured management processes as the basis for creating competencies and innovative trajectories. This is regardless of speciality discourse which group membership research provides diminutive comprehension into the effects of how new group participants evolve this dynamic. The aforementioned papers observe that innovations and commercial-able research and development (R&D) results are available but not all of these are commercialised. It is this topic that Ugonna and Onwualu engage in their paper, ‘Beyond research and development: policy options for overcoming obstacles to commercialisation of R&D results in Nigeria’. This paper identifies the challenges facing commercialisation of innovations in Nigeria which is notably an undeveloped science and engineering infrastructure. It supports Sabourin position that physical and intellectual infrastructure impacts meaningful knowledge transfer. The key recommendation of their paper is the establishment of a foundation for commercialisation of inventions and innovations that will function as a public private partnership (PPP) with the purpose of evaluating and appraising of commercialisation processes. They end with the hope of sustainable development which can lead to inclusive growth. This hope is shared by Vaithamanithi, Raj and Prabhakar in their paper, ‘Factors influencing adoption of clinical information system in private clinics in Chennai, India’. They note the restrictions on knowledge and its transfer capabilities within the healthcare arena as the complex nature of its constituent parts. This study shows there are conflicting academic views on the actual construction parameters in determining the priority and appropriateness of key values and sub section deliverable variables. There is a literary view on knowledge both as a category and as a commodity, which conceptualises how the dichotomies of tacit and explicit knowledge facilitate each other to the benefit of the recipient and resource stakeholders. Clearly, the work of Polanyi (1962, 1966, 1969) and Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) identifies a starting point for a fundamental argument whereby logical positivism or scientific empirical objectivism should not be considered the complete solution to knowledge management, with further acknowledgement that a consideration of subjectivism must be included in any hypothesis. Simply put, knowledge, as a focal point of scrutiny underpinning any argument against pure objectivity is myopic, and as this paper shows, unnecessarily reductionist, particularly given the relevance associated to healthcare interventions These papers cumulatively argue that the quality of knowledge transfer within organisations/group affects business efficacy and efficiency because, before any knowledge transfer takes place, a strategic and fundamental analysis surrounding the perception of knowledge must be revealed in order to identify knowledge transfer practitioner involvement. An emergent theme evolves within these papers which bases an understanding of knowledge derived within a relational causality surrounding the unity of knowledge and the unification of joint perspectives. This suggests a more pragmatic stance on the concept of knowledge value, particularly from a commercial orientation, wherein interpretation offsets any arguments to incorporate a much more significant transfer paradigm. In this regard, it can be seen that from a commercial impact perspective-knowledge, within the context of knowledge transfer validation, can only have two states in the reflection of its value: either yes or no. In this sense, these papers enhance current literature streams that suggest knowledge is interpreted from multiple positions and streams of verification, wherein it is often perceived as multi-faceted and multi-sourced, difficult to interpret without origin and in need of decryption. This essential prescript for validation of positional interpretation of knowledge as a definitive entity but not defined by value. As such, the relationship for transfer will be modified by characteristics such as previous interaction, communication, process support, success recognition and failure. This encompassment ultimately identifies the facilitators and barriers to the use of knowledge. In conclusion, these papers advocate a need for a prescriptive and semi-static process, which starts, stops and is measured from a procedural interpretation in relation to specific knowledge management practices. However, the understanding and utilisation of knowledge in terms of commercial impact is already not unproblematic. Encompassing commercial decision-making processes does not distinguish a precedence of creation from an experiential concept. Therefore, contrary to current management theory, these papers indicate each transfer is surrounded by an irrefutable evaluation of knowledge value, importantly, before it is even transferred. This positioning then determines the capability to functionally evaluate its transfer ability as a unified structure and hence, its value. It can be drawn from these papers, that it is the permeability of transference to encompass physical and intellectual infrastructure, which meaningfully impacts on commercial processes. All of these define these papers and make  them a significant contribution to knowledge and understanding of this topic.     References Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Polanyi,  M.  (1962)  Personal  Knowledge  towards  a  Post  Critical  Philosophy,  Routledge, New York. Polanyi, M. (1966) The Tacit Dimension, Garden City, Doubleday, New York. Polanyi, M. (1969) Knowing and Being, University of Chicago: Chicago. 

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