These days see me venture into new forays quite often. The latest addition to these adventures: a publication in an edited volume of the Fraunhofer Society. The focus of the volume is on concepts of knowledge transfer in the realm of higher education institutions (HEIs), ie. the transfers within the organisation or knowledge coming from outside it.

Colleagues and me have contributed a very short summary of our findings from a research project I’ve been working on from 2022 — 2024. “Very short” because that was the rule: The volume compiles findings from different research projects that were funded under the same moniker (“knowledge transfers”, unsurprisingly) and each project had a maximum of six pages to describe their results. Quite challenging…

More challenging, yet not in a good way, is the cover of the volume. I do not know who decided on it but hope that non of the editors was too much involved. It basically depicts everything most of the contributions are writing against regarding knowledge transfer: unidirectionality, mechanistic word views, HEIs as roboters. Wait, the last one hasn’t really been an issue so far but looking at the book’s cover, we should start to think about that one.

You should never judge a book by its cover but, quite frankly, this one makes it hard…