Wendy Faulkner - Böcker

Fostering interaction between industry and academic and government laboratories is widely seen as an important means of facilitating growth and innovation in the technology-based industries. Knowledge Frontiers investigates the research links and knowledge flows between industrial and public sector research in three new and promising fields of advanced technology - biotechnology, engineering ceramics, and parallel computing. Differences between these fields suggest that policies to promote public-private research links should be more effectively targeted. Similarities highlight the general importance to innovation of frontier research in universities, and the need to encourage informal interaction between industrial and public sector researchers.The book is a valuable addition for scientists, research directors in the public, private, and academic sectors, managers, and policy-makers interested in these new fields and, more broadly, in encouraging collaboration and technology transfer between public sector research and industry. For those interested in the study of innovation, it also adds to our understanding of the range of technical knolwedge used by companies in innovation."We could and should improve our performance by making the science and engineering base even more aware of and responsive to the needs of industry and other research users" - William Waldegrave, Minister for Science, in 1993 White Paper "Realising Our Potential".

The growing social and economic significance of expertise is reflected in suggestions that we are moving into a post-industrial "knowledge society". The subject of expertise is becoming recognized in a range of disciplines ranging from science and technology, psychology, computing and artificial intelligence through to management and organizational behaviour. This work brings together some of the diverse understandings of the character and implications of expertise, and demonstrates through a set of empirical case studies how expertise means different things to different groups, how it is constructed differently in different settings, and the consequences of this process for relations between "members" of the knowledge society and those "on the outside". Case study material ranges from a hospital ward and a factory, to a nuclear weapons facility.