transformational jobs are things like manufacturing, mining, and agriculture—today one job in five, whereas a century ago only one job in five was anything else;
transactional jobs are things like retail sales, accounting, and banking and brokerage;
tacit jobs involve 'searching, coordinating, and monitoring activities required to exchange goods, services, and information'; For instance, 'Running supply chains, managing the way customers experience products, reviving brands, and negotiating acquisitions.'
[...]"
In this context, Mr. MacEwen points to a publication of McKinsey&Company titled "Competitive Advantage through Better Interactions". Surely the entire IP business should be seen as part of the "tacit" sector. I think it would be quite interesting to discuss, on the basis of this conceptual framework, the role of the IP people in the context of innovation in general and oftware-related businesses in particular. In a more general context, Mr. MacEwen writes:
"[...] As McKinsey characterizes it, lawyers and similar people who deal with ambiguity and exercise judgment are engaging in 'tacit, complex interactions' (as opposed to explicit transactional interactions, which can be and are being automated, outsourced, or just plain eliminated [as when the bar-code scanner is integrated with the supply chain so that inventory and reordering can be removed from human hands]). As the economy focuses more and more on 'knowledge workers', then, 'as Adam Smith predicted, specialization tends to atomize work and to increase the need to interact.'
So the question for sophisticated law firms becomes, can we increase the productivity of our interactions? Can we, in other words, do for the tacit workers what we've already done for the transactional workers?
The first thing we can say is that it's clear that 'This shift toward tacit interactions upends everything we've known about organizations since the days of Alfred Sloan.' Gone is the pyramidal structure with tacit work only at the top; in are tools to help people collaborate more effectively both inside and outside their firms. Decision support tools can take care of checklists and deadlines, and automatically point the way towards best practices. Here's a concrete example:
"Kaiser Permanente is one of the organizations now pioneering the use of such technologies to improve the quality of complex interactions. The health care provider has developed not only unified digital records on its patients but also innovative decision-support tools, such as programs that track the schedules of caregivers for patients with diabetes and heart disease. Although it is hard to determine quantitatively whether physicians are making better judgments about medical care, data suggest that Kaiser has cut its patients' mortality rate for heart disease to levels well below the US national average."
One can only imagine the fear and loathing experienced by doctors who were asked to abandon their notebooks and manila file folders and to 'trust' the digital records.
Similarly, cutting-edge law firms will need to step back from the (false?) comfort of hierarchical staffing and move towards 'environments that encourage tacit employees to explore new ideas, to operate in a [...] more team-oriented and unstructured way.'
Feeling trepidation? Here's the good news: 'Such capabilities will be difficult for competitors to duplicate. Best practices will be hard to transplant from one company to another if they are based on talented people supported by unique organizational and leadership models and armed with a panoply of complementary technologies.' [...]"
I wonder what consequences, if any, such considerations would have / should have with regard to the current business of IP professionals. At least, I think, this topic appears to be closely related to that question. A significant improvement of tacit interactions provided by patent professionals might be bound to efforts for "closing the loop", i.e. facilitating the exploitation of some "knowledge feedback" from the patent system into the various R&D and marketing processes of the enterprises out there.
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Dipl.-Phys. Axel H Horns is Patentanwalt (German Patent Attorney),
European Patent Attorney as well as European Trade Mark Attorney. In particular, he is Member of:
Mr. Bruce MacEwen 
this topic appears to be closely related to that question. A significant improvement of tacit interactions provided by patent professionals might be bound to efforts for "closing the loop", i.e. facilitating the exploitation of some "knowledge feedback" from the patent system into the various R&D and marketing processes of the enterprises out there.
