PhD Defence Mark Wiersma | Knowledge Transfer between universities of applied sciences and SMES: A study of innovation spaces

Knowledge Transfer between universities of applied sciences and SMES: A study of innovation spaces

Mark Wiersma is a PhD student in the Department of Human Resource Management. (Co)Promotors are prof.dr. T. Bondarouk and dr. J.G. Meijerink from the Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Science (UT) and dr. P.W.M. Rutten from the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.

Small and medium-sized enterprises operate in an environment that is changing rapidly. New technologies, digital systems and data-driven tools continuously reshape how work is organized. While these developments create opportunities, they also generate uncertainty. Knowledge that was once reliable can quickly become outdated, and new knowledge often feels complex, abstract or risky.

For many SMEs, learning is deeply embedded in daily practice. Knowledge is built through experience, routines and informal collaboration, rather than through formal systems or documentation. This makes organizations flexible and pragmatic, yet also vulnerable when existing ways of working no longer fit new technological demands. Limited time, resources and room for experimentation further increase hesitation to adopt unfamiliar ideas.

At the same time, governments increasingly expect Universities of Applied Sciences to support SMEs in navigating these changes. Through student projects, living labs and other practice-based collaborations, UAS and SMEs meet in so-called innovation spaces. These environments are meant to support experimentation and shared learning. In practice, however, they also introduce new uncertainties about skills, roles and the value of different forms of knowledge.

A central challenge lies in how organizations decide what knowledge to trust and use. New ideas often conflict with existing beliefs, routines and economic priorities. When uncertainty is high, organizations tend to postpone learning or stick to what feels safe. This leads to knowledge inertia: knowing that change is needed, but struggling to act.

This research starts from the assumption that learning under uncertainty is not only a technical or managerial issue, but also an epistemic one. It asks how people and organizations make sense of knowledge, how beliefs are formed or revised, and how learning becomes possible when outcomes are not yet clear. By focusing on these processes, the study seeks to better understand how SMEs and educational institutions can jointly strengthen their capacity to learn and adapt in a constantly changing environment.

Different sets of possible worlds, structured through Kripke semantics in modal and epistemic logic, provide a powerful formal way to model and expand absorptive capacity in SMEs. By varying the accessibility relation in Kripke frames we can represent organizations with different levels of epistemic openness: a restrictive relation limits accessible alternatives to familiar routines and proven practices, thereby reinforcing inertia, whereas a more permissive relation allows greater epistemic flexibility. A more permissive accessibility relation, expanded through collaborations, opens additional worlds where new technologies or ideas become conceivable, reducing negative introspection (the irreversible lock-out of possibilities) and enabling belief revision.

In certain extensions of modal semantics, this openness is further captured by an extension relation which relates epistemic states in a way that one extends or refines another by adding more information or detail. Unlike the standard accessibility relation (which connects worlds as alternatives), the extension relation models growth of knowledge: a state extends another when it incorporates new evidence or insights while preserving consistency with the prior state.

In the context of SME learning, innovation spaces (student projects, solution experiments, field labs, living labs) act as mechanisms that induce such extensions dynamically refining epistemic models by introducing alternative scenarios, challenging existing doxastic commitments, and fostering awareness of uncertainty (negative introspection on ignorance).

This structured refinement and expansion of the epistemic landscape transforms knowledge absorption from a reactive, embedded process into a more adaptive one: SMEs not only sense emerging opportunities but also seize and reconfigure them, building dynamic capabilities to respond to rapid technological change. The modal approach shows that absorptive capacity is not merely about acquiring more information, but about governing the epistemic landscape. This means refining possible worlds to balance stability with the flexibility needed for sustained innovation.