Introduction to the special issue: transferring knowledge for innovation

Knowledge is an important company resource, particularly when the organisation is striving to create new goods and services and to be more innovative. Knowledge is created at the interface between individuals and organisations and also by original scholarly research; however, this new knowledge must often be diffused across an organisation or transferred between organisations before it can be internalised and adopted. Therefore the modes and mechanisms for transferring knowledge transfer have, over the past 25 years, been steadily receiving more and more attention. This special issue of the Journal of R&D Management recognises this progression and brings forward recent academic papers with the aim of extending this field. Each paper offers insights into this phenomena at a national/policy, organisational or activity level and were originally submitted to a Special Interest Group, led by the Editors of the Special Issue and hosted by the International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM) between 2013 and 2015. Whilst introducing each of these papers, the introduction for the Special Issue: Transferring Knowledge for Innovation also makes a unique contribution to the field, by presenting a simple heuristic that could be used to offer some degree of categorisation in terms of the respective content and therefore contribution of each paper.