Brain Drain and Business Communication

Now here's a problem you may not have considered: how does a company pass along expertise? That is a communication problem; it is a communication problem in particular for businesses; and it is a problem that, according to recent reports, is going to be endemic throughout American business very soon.

Here's an account of what happened at NASA:

"Consider the chilling example of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Way back in the 1960s it spent $24 billion (in 1969 dollars)—and at one point employed 400,000 people—to send 12 astronauts to the moon. But in the 23 years since the Apollo program ended, the engineers who carried crucial know-how in their heads, without ever passing it on to colleagues, have retired or died (or both). At the same time, important blueprints were catalogued incorrectly or not at all, and the people who drew them are no longer around to draw them again. So to fulfill the Bush administration's promise to return to the moon in the next decade, NASA is essentially starting all over again. Estimated cost to taxpayers in current dollars: $100 billion."

Now this is not a simple problem: expertise, and local knowledge, are far harder to pass along to others than "school-knowledge"--i.e., things that have been systematized and codified into learnable, memorizable, and manageable chunks.

If you want to work on a great Ph.D. problem, and make money doing it, this would be worth working on...

Read the whole thing...