2. Systems of Innovation and Contexts of Creativity: An Assessment of the Knowledge Bases of Canadian City-Regions

Knowledge transfer profiles of public research organisations: the role of fields of knowledge specialisation

“…The natural sciences have an important component of analytic knowledge (Spencer and Vinodrai 2006), which is abstract and universal, characterised as 'know what' and 'know why' (Lundvall and Johnson 1994), based on a commonly accepted language that can be easily codified and transferred, with relatively constant meaning across context (Autio 1997;Johnson et al 2002). Typically, KT occurs through the embodiment of analytical knowledge into standardised information-based products such as patents, blueprints, recipes, software codes, maps, models, or forecasting tools (Asheim and Gertler 2005).…”

“…The technical sciences-like engineering and biotechnology and to some extent clinical sciences like medicine-have an important component of synthetic knowledge (Coenen et al 2006;Spencer and Vinodrai 2006) since they often involve the search for solutions to specific applied problems. Synthetic knowledge is only partly codified and, when applying the knowledge to the solution of a user-specific problem, tacit knowledge 'know-how' and 'know-who' (Lundvall and Johnson 1994;Lundvall 1996) are important.…”

“…The social sciences are characterised by knowledge created and transmitted in the form of interpretative frameworks and abstracted models of social behaviour, which contain a mix of analytical and symbolic knowledge (Spencer and Vinodrai 2006). The research outputs are abstract and in principle codified and have a high degree of market readiness, since they do not require a large amount of further technological development.…”