Innovation and Knowledge Management cheat sheet

Key terms

Knowledge management

The deliberate and systematic coordination of an organisation's people, technology, processes and organisational structure in order to add value through reuse and innovation, achieved by creating, sharing and applying knowledge and by feeding valuable lessons learned and best practices into corporate memory. The definition is Dalkir's and it is the one the syllabus assumes.

Data

Raw facts and figures without context: 496, 502, 488.

Information

Data placed in context and processed so that it answers a question: the mean fill of the last twenty bottles was 495.3 ml.

Knowledge

Information combined with experience, interpretation and judgement, which allows action: the filler is drifting low, as it did before the last bearing failure, so inspect the bearing.

Wisdom

The judgement to apply knowledge appropriately, including knowing when not to act. The data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy is conventional and is examined, though it is criticised for implying that knowledge is merely accumulated information rather than something constructed by a person.

Tacit knowledge

Knowledge held in a person's head that is difficult to articulate: skill, intuition, judgement, know-how. Polanyi's formulation is that we know more than we can tell. It is transferred mainly by demonstration, apprenticeship and shared experience.

Explicit knowledge

Knowledge that has been articulated and recorded: procedures, specifications, drawings, reports, databases. It can be copied, stored and transmitted at almost no cost, which is both its advantage and the reason it is easily lost in volume.

Implicit knowledge

Knowledge that could be articulated but has not been, distinguished by some writers from tacit knowledge, which resists articulation in principle.

Intellectual capital

The stock of knowledge-based assets: human capital held by people, structural capital embedded in systems and processes, and relational capital held in relationships with customers, suppliers and partners.

Codification strategy

Knowledge is extracted from the person, made explicit and stored in a repository so that it can be reused many times by many people. Suits standardised, repeatable work where the same problem recurs, and it makes economic sense because the cost of codifying is recovered over many reuses.

Personalisation strategy

Knowledge remains with the person and the organisation invests in connecting the person who needs it to the person who has it, through networks, directories, communities and mentoring. Suits customised, novel work where each problem differs and codification would be uneconomic.

Why the choice matters

Hansen, Nohria and Tierney's finding is that successful organisations pursue one strategy predominantly, roughly eighty per cent, and use the other in support. Organisations that pursue both equally succeed at neither, because the two require different systems, different incentives and different people.