Chemical Heritage Foundation
Times: 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM
Place: Chemical Heritage Foundation
Program
Registration
The term "technology transfer" began to assume importance among many experts concerned with economic development in the decade immediately after World War II, as attention in the western world focused on the rebuilding of Europe and then on the effort to encourage economic growth and modernization in the developing world. But in recent decades a desire to improve the movement of technological knowledge and information across institutional boundaries has become common, almost ubiquitous, whether the institutions are governmental agencies and research organizations, business corporations, university research facilities, or non-governmental agencies concerned with development. Indeed, the activity of technology transfer occurs under many different terms (diffusion, knowledge or technology flows, or knowledge management) as scholars from many different areas of study attack the issues involved. But attention to the subject is not simply a matter of scholarly interest. For many business, government, university, and non-governmental agencies, organizations, insuring the easy movement of knowledge, information, and technology is a high priority.
The 2009 Gordon Cain Conference at the Chemical Heritage Foundation will explore this widened focus for technology transfer through a series of talks and discussions on March 27 and 28. There will be an opening reception followed by the opening keynote address & discussion on Friday March 27 from 5:00 to 7:30 PM. Bruce Seely will give the opening talk on "The Flow and Diffusion of Knowledge and Technology: A Historian's View of Technology Transfer." The following day an all-day discussion of the topic will take place as the process of diffusion will be examined as it takes place at three different institutional scales. In each instance, an academic speaker (John Krige of Georgia Tech, Janet Bercovitz of UIUC, and Margaret Graham of McGill) who has studied the process will describe the nature of the processes as they see it and explore the basic patterns involved at that level. Then a practitioner (Sylvia Kraemer formerly of NASA, Dana Bostrom of Portland State, and Robert Matheson of DuPont) in the process of transfer and diffusion will present a comment concerning the field as they see it, before the audience joins the conversation. A goal of the meeting is to take initial steps toward an overarching framework describing the movement of technical knowledge and practices across and through agencies and boundaries. Currently, different strands of scholarly activities explore the field, with little interaction between them. This conference will bring together scholars from different areas of study with practitioners engaged in the actual process itself.