KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER BETWEEN UNIVERSITIES OF APPLIED SCIENCES AND SMES: A STUDY OF INNOVATION SPACES
Modal Consciousness
Apparent when deliberate choices are based on experience of governing choices for situations and contexts, evaluation of methods and results of Mode 3-4, and the descriptions in terms of logical schemas based on situations. Our concept involves organizational learning and the absorption of knowledge in SMEs and UASs, where modal consciousness allows agents to act according to their awareness of the dynamic, contextual nature of knowledge. This supports advanced epistemic capabilities for managing uncertainty, experimenting, and justifying knowledge claims in innovation activities.
Crucial under uncertainty
Modal Consciousness describes a specific form of awareness that becomes crucial when people and organisations operate under uncertainty. It refers to how individuals and teams become aware of what is possible, what is uncertain, and what could work under different conditions, before they take action.
In everyday work, decisions are often based on routines and past experience. This works well in stable environments, where outcomes are predictable. In rapidly changing contexts, however, those routines lose reliability. New technologies, shifting markets and evolving roles create situations in which outcomes can no longer be known in advance. Modal Consciousness emerges precisely in these situations.
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Centering on possibilities
Rather than focusing on fixed answers, Modal Consciousness centres on possibilities. It involves recognising multiple ways forward, understanding that some options remain uncertain, and consciously choosing how to act within that uncertainty. This type of awareness allows people to reflect on their assumptions, question existing beliefs and explore alternatives without needing immediate certainty.
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What would work here?
In practice, Modal Consciousness shows itself when organisations ask different questions. Instead of asking “What is the correct solution?”, they ask “What could work here?”, “Under which conditions?” and “What can we learn by trying?”. This shift supports experimentation, learning and adaptation while maintaining connection to everyday work.
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Key role for students
Within collaborations between Universities of Applied Sciences and SMEs, students often play a key role in activating Modal Consciousness. By approaching problems without long-standing routines or fixed beliefs, they introduce variation and help make implicit assumptions visible. This creates space for reflection and learning on both sides.
Modal Consciousness therefore offers a way to understand learning as a dynamic process. It explains how organisations can move forward without complete certainty, by becoming more aware of possibilities, limits and choices. In environments shaped by constant change, this awareness becomes a core capability for sustainable learning and innovation.
Conscious moves
On a pragmatic level this study explores how both agents and students can make conscious moves, which involve navigating specifically between the epistemological and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge. The study analyzes how different practices can make coherent and reliable future representations of knowledge that enable agents to be more adaptive. It analyzes how these changes affect awareness of the effect of existing routines on new knowledge needs in SMEs. Examining the conditions that epistemically govern how we can experiment and create such models allows us to describe a topology of knowledge interfaces between UASs and SMEs.
Our model of an innovation space allows us to experiment with various epistemic and real-world dimensions, including most of the learning concerns models for constant coupling of functionalities of agents in smaller SME systems and the ability to influence their activities. The aim is to develop self-sustainability in absorption as a result of what we conceptualized as modal consciousness. This concept aims to understand different absorption dynamics and necessary knowledge modification methods to determine the effective channels for identification, transfer, and transformation aimed at self-sustainability of human agents in different contexts.