The systematic failure of validated knowledge to become lived practice; one signature that repeats at four scales, with a different bottleneck at each.
The academic term comes from implementation science, where it is measured, not metaphorical: an average of 17 years for evidence to reach routine clinical practice. I adopt the term and widen it. The same signature, knowledge present and behaviour unchanged, separates a seller's training from the next customer conversation, a boardroom from the journals, and a civilisation's science from its institutions.
Four scales, four bottlenecks: the Knowledge-Doing Gap of the individual (embodiment), the Innovation-Realisation Gap of the organisation (the operating system), the Research-Practice Gap of the ecosystem (feedback infrastructure) and the Governance Gap of the polity (constitutional embedding). The remedies do not substitute: training cannot fix a budget process, software cannot give a seller unconscious competence.