Download Developing Networks and a Market for Knowledge

Judge Business School
Developing Networks and a
Market for
Knowledge Brokerage
Arnoud De Meyer
Director
Professor of Management Studies
April 18, 2007
The World of Management and Organisations is
moving to a new Paradigm
• Offshoring: from subcontracting to outsourcing to
partnering
• Knowledge Content of all our products and services is
increasing rapidly
• New forms of globalisation in organisations are
emerging
• The creation of a vast group of lower middle class in
emerging countries with their own needs and
ambitions
• Stepchanges in the ICT capabilities and user
friendliness (Web2.0, $1 terminal, ubiquity)
This leads to profound changes
• Offshoring: from subcontracting to outsourcing to partnering
• Suppliers become partners in value creation and product
design
• Knowledge Content of all our products and services is increasing
rapidly
• Knowledge workers become dominant
• New forms of globalisation in organisations are emerging
• From a ‘triangular’ network towards a network of peers
• The creation of a vast group of lower middle class in emerging
countries with their own needs and ambitions
• Ideas for innovation can come from anywhere
• Stepchanges in the ICT capabilities and user friendliness
• Growing irrelevance of geographical and organisational
boundaries
The world moves towards:
• Networks, networks, networks
• Knowledge trading as a major
source of economic activities
Some of the Issues
1. Protection of intangible goods will be a
growing issue
2. Need for new methods of decision
analysis and decision making in a world
of information overload
3. The technology works, but how do you
learn from a far away site?
4. Building the knowledge organisation
What is a firm or an organisation
• Creating economies of scale for capital
attraction and retention
• A structure to organise differentiation and
integration
• Minimising transactions costs associated with
markets
• Or… a structure in which we have developed
the capability to combine and recombine
information in order to transform it into
knowledge (or even wisdom?)
Knowledge has value
• An organisation exists because it has
knowledge others don’t have
• Information assymetry is the raison d’être of
any organisation
• Thus:
• How do you protect your proprietary
knowledge?
• How do you mine your intellectual property?
Exploiting Intellectual Property
• Protection is key, but difficult and costly
• Methods of IP protection:
Patents & trade secrets
Copyrights, trade marks, brands
Speed
Monopoly/captivity on markets or resources
• Rather than focusing on one aspect of this, we need to
carefully manage the portfolio of protecting
mechanisms
• IP protection does not come naturally to people; some
cultures do not appreciate the value of intangibles;
Adjust your policy to the local environment
• And after all that effort… what do we do with it ?
I.P. mining
• Tap patents for new revenues
• Audit your IP assets to optimise portfolio
management:
Reduce maintenance costs on unneeded
patents
• Enhance entrepreneurship through seed funds
(and improve your corporate value)
• IPR as competitive weapon:
Constrain your competitor
Steer the R&D portfolio
Learning from far away: how to
smoothen the information flows?
• Create credibility
• Clear and dynamic charter
• Quick wins
• Stimulate diversity
• In culture
• And systems and processes
• Invest in elaborate and diversified communication
systems
• Understand all the networks, including the ones that
operate around you.
Building the Knowledge organisations:
why is it a challenge?
Information overload does not lead to knowledge creation: every
ten years we double the quantity of data/information
What are the incentives to move from being a reader to become a
writer
Knowledge is power (though culture may be a moderating factor):
why would I give it up?
We are at the beginning of a new paradigm in terms of search and
decision strategies: from convergent to divergent thinking
Technology is an important tool, but not the unique component of
the solution!
From Readers to Writers
• Motivation for sharing
– reward people who share
– incent people to share
– “Ideally a situation would occur where the people who were getting ahead in
the firm were those sharing knowledge”
• Inhibitors for sharing
–
–
–
–
time/priorities
attitudes and beliefs
culture/fear
confusion over “knowledge”
• Pervasive appreciation of importance of knowledge
management
– getting top management to show appropriate leadership
• Appropriate knowledge management infrastructure
Some suggestions, based on our
research
Knowledge has become a resource similar to capital and
human resources: manage it with the same attention:
• Architect your organisational knowledge
• Build a K-corps:
• Strategy
• Infrastructure
• Processes
• Organisation
• Products and services
• Consider knowledge as the organisational glue:
companies as knowledge switchboards.
Architecting your knowledge
• Is everybody plugged in into the organisation’s knowledge
network?
• Do you have a conscious design of your global
knowledge base?
• What are the incentives to keep building the
knowledge base
• How do you do the quality control?
• How do you structure knowledge in order to avoid confusion
through overload
• Who leads the knowledge conversion processes?