When Knowledge Transfer Goes Global: How People and Organizations Learned About Information Technology, 1945–1970

Abstract

This article argues that an information ecosystem emerged rapidly after World War II that made possible the movement of knowledge about computing and its uses around the world. Participants included engineers, scientists, government officials, business management, and users of the technology. Vendors, government agencies, the military, and professors participated regardless of such barriers as languages, cold war politics, or varying levels of national economic levels of prosperity.

Exploring How ICTs and Administration Are Entwined: The Promise of Information Ecosystems

“…They, and scholars in other disciplines, began to move away from older concerns about how much ICT there was in the world (Subramanian & Katz, 2011). It no longer mattered (Cortada, 2014).…”

“…It became obvious to historians that such adoptions of technologies were more global than previously thought (Osterhammel, 2009). Mechanisms for diffusing new processes and ICTs could be used by organizations to learn from other enterprises and, increasingly, by the 1960s, from other industries (Cortada, 2014).…”

“…The British and American governments were keen on their scientists collaborating across academic institutions and countries. In the late 1940s, again in the 1960s, and since the 1990s, scientists attended each other’s conferences to learn about developments in computing technologies, even during the Cold War across the Iron Curtain (Cortada, 2014; Graham, 1998).…”