unclechina.org

What many businesspeople don’t realize is that as we go about our business on a daily basis there exists an army of people doing valuable research for us, poking their heads into every nook and cranny of the world, asking the questions we need the answers to, and writing up the results for free distribution to all who are interested.  These people are known as professors, scholars, academicians and occasionally eggheads.  The fruit of their research is available in university libraries, scholarly journals and on online databases such as jstor.org   Only trouble is, the wisdom they have labored to discover for mankind is written like this:

 By taking a learning approach to international cooperative ventures, this study introduces absorptive capacity as a principle governing the relationship between knowledge possession and knowledge search among prospective partners. Two alternative hypotheses are juxtaposed: The first is that firms will seek additional knowledge in the same area in which they already have a knowledge base; the second is that firms will seek knowledge in a complementary area. Data from 90 partner-seeking firms in China show that the possession of complementary knowledge is a prerequisite for knowledge search. Furthermore, in line with the learning perspective, the equity joint venture is the vehicle of choice for firms seeking transfer of tacit, embedded knowledge. 

In other words, this is a study on how joint venture partners decide who to partner with and why.  But if you are a normal human being, a normal businessperson at that, it is a painful experience to struggle through the paper and try to understand what the professors are trying to say.  Which is odd, since you’d think that the people who could most use the information are businesspeople.  But businesspeople are among the last readers with time to try to translate academic gobbledegook  into plain language.  It’s as if the secrets to eternal salvation were written in Latin for the lay people of old England (it’s been tried).