Transferring the `TPM Concept´ from Delft to Harbin: from Magic to Implementation

Policy transfer from cultural environment to another by transfer agents has increasingly been studied in recent years, but rarely if ever by participants in such processes themselves. This paper takes the transfer of the ´TPM´ concept from TU-Delft (NL) to Harbin Institute of Technology (CN) as an example to reveal how such transfers take place at the micro-level by individual people having their particular drives, skills and networks. The result shows that the players from Harbin found their own way by borrowing ´TPM´ as a magical promising concept, selling it as a means to solve problems and then transforming it to fit their own Chinese circumstances