The Future of Knowledge Management

This book aims to provide a forum for leading scholars in knowledge management to engage in debate on current research and shed light on future prospects in this field. The papers in this issue are based upon the ‘Fifth European Conference on Organizational Knowledge, Learning, and Capabilities [OKLC]’, hosted by the Department of Management at the University of Innsbruck in April 2004.

The emphasis placed in recent years on knowledge and learning as the new sources of wealth (Badaracco, 1991; Drucker, 1993; Sveiby, 1997; Boisot, 1998) has led to a preoccupation with ways in which knowledge and learning can be ‘managed’ so that their contribution to organizational performance can be best predicted and achieved. This preoccupation has resulted in knowledge and learning’s being treated like entities to be manipulated at will. Moreover, as a result of this preoccupation, the attention has shifted more towards the outcome of learning and knowledge, away from the process of learning and knowing itself. The ongoing challenge in knowledge management debates remains the need to identify ways we can better understand the dynamic nature of knowing in action. Although practice-based approaches (Bourdieu, 1980; Orlikowski, 1992; Turner, 1994; Gherardi, 2000) have enabled us to capture some of the forces which shape the nature of knowing, we have yet to fully understand how knowing is put into practice. This chapter contributes to this debate and argues that a better understanding of the relationship between learning and knowledge can provide valuable insights into knowing in practice.

This chapter investigates several issues regarding the nature, domain, conceptual foundations and practical challenges of knowledge management and organizational learning. The chapter first identifies and contrasts two fundamental philosophical orientations to knowledge management — the personal knowledge orientation and the organizational knowledge orientation — and illustrates the distinctive kinds of knowledge management practices that result from the two orientations. It then summarizes three essential organizational processes in knowledge management: (1) maintaining learning loops in all organizational processes; (2) systematically disseminating knowledge throughout an organization; and (3) applying knowledge wherever it can be used in an organization. A general model of organizational learning — the Five Learning Cycles model — is introduced to represent how individuals, groups and the overall organization are linked in an organizational learning process. Key challenges in managing each of the five learning cycles are discussed, and examples of appropriate managerial interventions are proposed for each learning cycle. Concluding comments suggest how knowledge management processes reflect a fundamental shift in management thinking and practice from traditional concepts of command and control to more contemporary concepts of facilitation and empowerment.

The rationale behind the existence of organizations may be seen — among other reasons — in the advantages of the division of labour (Crozier and Friedberg, 1980). At the same time, size and structure of organizations require a subdivision among members along functions, tasks and duties. The larger an organization, the more departments and members will have to be co-ordinated. In order to ensure disparate parts and divisions are able to pool their efforts and their expertise, actions as well as knowledge need to be synchronized and co-ordinated. Knowledge management is a means to co-ordinate what is known in an organization, whereas organizational learning describes the change of that organizational knowledge. In a globalized environment characterized by hypercompetition and knowledge-intensive processes (D’Aveni, 1994) knowledge management and reflection on organizational learning become increasingly a necessity in organizations because they may be generators of competitive advantages (Penrose, 1995; Spender, 1996; cf. Becker et al., 2002).

This chapter focuses on the recent strongly advocated idea to use stories and story-telling in knowledge management. It explores the nature of narrative knowledge as compared to other forms of knowledge, in particular discursive knowledge, and discusses its merits and shortcomings. A new concept more suited to the requirements of knowledge management is proffered, which aims at discussing and validating narrative knowledge.

By 2005 the area of knowledge management does not suffer from scarcity of approaches but rather from their overabundance. Although some concepts have gained visibility in the field, there is still no overarching framework.

One of the managerial advances that have resulted from the widespread deployment of information and communication technologies (in particular, the Internet) is the ability to greatly enhance a firm’s innovation capacity by leveraging external knowledge resources. While the importance of absorbing external knowledge to support innovation has been understood for some time (for example, Cohen and Levinthal, 1990), firms have historically been limited in their ability to reach beyond their boundaries for innovative ideas for several reasons, including the absence of open standards for communication and the idiosyncrasy of knowledge (Arora and Gambardella, 1994). Consequently, the inter-organizational division of innovative labour has traditionally been limited to a few specialized industries, such as biotechnology (Shan et al., 1994; Powell et al., 1996), pharmaceuticals (Cockburn et al., 2000) and the automotive industry (Langlois and Robertson, 1992; Dyer and Nobeoka, 2000).

This chapter investigates how knowledge related to basketball equipment emerges and spreads within online basketball communities. Our netnographic research shows that within online basketball communities commonly shared knowledge arises through shoptalk of members’ product usage experiences, basketball-related know-how and opinions. Knowledge-sharing is not only supported by vivid stories but also by uploaded pictures and drawings to which community members are referring. Valuable discussions are archived and can be easily found and accessed by every community member. New knowledge emerges within online basketball communities by members’ jointly working on problems or tasks self-stated by individual, well-respected community members in the form of ‘friendly’ competitions. While many community members provide their product judgement and engage in discussions on how to improve the user-generated designs, only a small number of community members possess sufficient creativity, domain-specific skills and motivation to develop new basketball shoes. The high quality and variety of community members’ knowledge seems to be a promising source of innovation. In addition, various examples indicate community members’ positive predisposition to share their know-how and ideas with producers. This leads to discussing how creative communities can be virtually integrated into a company’s innovation process.

Is market knowledge really useful to advance innovation and why are some companies better at using market knowledge to generate innovation than others? This paper addresses this issue conceptually, building on the assumption that it is distribution and usage of market knowledge which make the difference in innovative competition. We build on two different streams of research: market orientation and market knowledge, and knowledge brokering. We show why the emergence of internal market knowledge brokers may enhance the opportunity of innovation for organizations. We distinguish four different types of internal brokers. This distinction is related to the typology of knowledge to be transferred between two internal parties and the cognitive distance between these parties. Conclusions and implications are drawn on how companies should manage these figures of internal brokers in order to favour the distribution and the usage of market knowledge on the edge of innovation.

Since the importance of multifunctional teams for innovation has been recognized, there has been an ongoing discussion with regard to how diverse knowledge of the functional specialists should be combined and how cooperation should take place. In this chapter, I argue that a multifunctional team should be considered a distributed cognitive system. Such a distributed system should satisfy at least two requirements: shared location knowledge and developing a shared representation. The aim of this chapter is to conceptualize the processes whereby these requirements could be realized. These processes are described as joint speech acts. ‘Speech Act Theory’ conceptualizes language use as a type of social interaction. This theory is used to explain the development of location knowledge and shared interpretation.

This chapter examines how leadership influences learning in knowledge-based organizations. The pertinent literature suggests that leadership has a major impact on the learning capabilities of a corporation and its members. Consequently, organizations are increasingly viewing leadership as a source of competitive advantage. This is particularly true of high-tech and knowledge-based organizations that act in a complex and dynamic environment. Although there is a lack of empirical evidence of how exactly leadership influences learning in organizations, this chapter takes a modest step to further reduce the existing gap by pointing out how learning in organizations demands specific leadership requirements and how these leadership requirements can be achieved. We will propose a ‘learning leadership model’ that goes beyond the traditional understanding of leadership and can be used as a starting point for a holistic approach to leadership in knowledge-based organizations.

Intangible assets have an impact of up to 80 per cent on the economic value of a firm. In the twenty-first century competitive landscape intangible assets represent the key drivers for a firm’s competitiveness. This chapter shows that leadership and strategy are the intangible assets which contribute most to competitive advantages.

Knowledge as a resource of special attributes increasingly attracts management attention. After some initiatives to learn more about knowledge management, usually one or more of the following questions emerges to become top priority for decision-makers: