Industry's View
William O. Baker, retired chairman of the board. Bell Telephone Laboratories:
The academic research enterprise in science and technology is for the generation of knowledge, while industry depends heavily on the use of knowledge. In each of these exertions, the actions leading to the desired result are adapted to the environs, so that military organization and discipline act on the basis of information very differently than the marketing of soap or the manufacture of computers. Similarly in education, knowledge is expertly and often traditionally organized for transfer so it can go from one set of minds and records to another.
In view of these conditions connecting knowledge and action, we emphasize to this conference that drastic and basic changes in both the organizing of knowledge, and the actions which it will energize, are hard upon us in a free enterprise society. The abundance of discussions and studies on university-industry combinations has brought out the heartening recognition that we should know more and act smarter than we do. But the ways of acting smarter, specifically by knowing more, which is what industry might hope to achieve by university conjunction, are not so easy. This is especially because the organizing of knowledge that industry requires and has long extracted from its own R&D, is a continuum between basic discovery and final manufacturing or applications engineering, with a huge component of development and engineering technology comprising its midsection.
Academic knowledge organization, however, abhors a continuum. It is usually constructed on departmental lines, where there is elegant discipline identification, often for good reasons of quality control. This identification separates basic chemistry from mathematical statistics and solid state physics, from process metallurgy and biogenetics from plant nutrition and so on. Now everyone says that it just remains for a good systems engineer or industrial technologist to integrate all these good sources of academic research and inquiry, and a new effective continuum can be synthesized.
The trouble is that there are often fundamental gaps in the knowledge, and of course, usually vast vacancies in the developmental and technological phases of it, so that a false continuum is produced. This occupational disease of the business planner, the production engineer or even the entrepreneur, must be treated decisively with the most modern therapy. It appears that we can progressively identify and perhaps even avoid these discontinuities by various ways of organizing knowledge so that the discontinuities are early recognized. Then perhaps they may even be pursued in academic context, or at least not ignored through to the time of commercialization, as happens so often in product recalls, defective automobile litigation, drug liabilities and many other commercial technical stumbles.