Targetted Improvements Focusing improvement to maximize benefits and minimize impact

In the creative environment where research takes place not everything can be improved. The creative “essence” of research must be undisturbed while “accident” wasted effort is reduced to a minimum. In this paper we discuss the types of knowledge at play in the research environment, introduce a new abstract model of knowledge, and using the model explain how we should focus our effort on research students and on particular types of knowledge transfer in order to gain an over all improvement in our research processes. Just as we teach to facilitate student learning, so too can we supervise, teach and guide to facilitate better and faster researching in our academic computer science departments. Computer science education, process improvement, knowledge management, research environment