These are quite wide ranging and occur in a rather random manner. They can be thought of as either passive, where information or knowledge just "arrives" or active, where information is actually searched for, particularly for a specific purpose. The nature of these flows have been discussed elsewhere but nevertheless is useful to have these methods confirmed by both academics and industrialist across the size spectrum.

Industry will only consider ideas, processes and tools if they have the potential to benefit their businesses. They will clearly do some development and evaluation work, but are less inclined to take a speculative process or a very initial tool development and apply them to processes upon which their livelihoods depend.

Thus one of the technology transfer issues becomes this "validation" issue. This is particularly true of the medium/small organisations that strongly wish to see or have examples of applications of best or good practice before embarking on a change.

figure 5. Aspects of product development process (key future issues shown in red)

The concern associated with this area of design research was also articulated by Professor Andreasen in his keynote address(Appendix2), Figure 5 from this address shows what he referred to as the "missing link", the "making into methods" part of the overall process from research to utilisation, which he considered vital to the application of design research results. The general consensus is that a lot of design research (and probably research in general) does not get beyond the first box of the diagram. This is an area of considerable concern and one that needs some attention.