I’ve often heard the argument that one of the best reasons to implement a knowledge management program is to harness innovation — yet the relationship between knowledge management and innovation is certainly a complex one.
While it seems intuitive that more knowledge sharing equals more innovation, since it enables us to think and act collaboratively, knowledge sharing also allows us to sort out the good information from the noise.
We all attempt to process an incredible amount of information every day — and if you’re anything like me, by the end of the day, there is a good amount of that information that ends up unprocessed or half processed.
As Jack Vinson points out in the link above, we all rely on others to help inform our decision-making, and this biased (OK, maybe bias is a strong word) information is what we use to help us decide what’s important and what can be left to another day (or what we can just ignore).
In that informed decision-making process, knowing what not to do is just as important as what to do. While we often get the positive side of the innovation story, it’s also important to get people to share their failures and things that just went wrong — these anecdotes keep the same mistakes from being repeated.
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April 23rd, 2007 at 7:40 pm
I’ve often wondered (haven’t been able to research yet) it the market hasn’t turned us all into cynics, assuming a high degree of falsehood attached to all pieces of information. Not bad in itself, just to say we’ve established tougher filters and will often require more information in order to make an informed decision (think comparison shopping, or searching for reviews, for instance).
On the other hand, knowledge sharing solves that problem immensely. That is, if you get a reference from someone you trust recommending or endorsing a product, an idea, a project, a thought, or whatever, you’re that much more likely to lower your filters and give it a shot. I guess it’s the idea behind the semantic web and such: I can find a gazillion sites that match a search query on Google, most of them with information that, though relevant, will not be precisely of use to whatever purpose I have at the time. But at the same time, I can look for references through my del.icio.us links, by following the chain from what I’ve tagged before, to what other people have tagged under the same concepts. That carries the guarantee that a human forged that semantic link, and is, in turn, much more likely to be relevant (moreover, a human who applied the same criteria I did before). Our filters are lowered, our decisions and information consumption made simpler (at least a bit).
I hope I’ll be able to develop those points further sometime. . .
April 24th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
I think you raise a few excellent points in your comment, Eduardo. Knowledge itself is really just contextualized information — and too often we make the assumption that providing people (be they workers, managers or other specific cases) with more information will allow them to be more efficient and productive.
A knowledge sharing approach is one that advances the interactive, iterative process of how we deal with information. Often, people who are forced to make decisions outside of any social or broader context will make poor decisions — even though they may have the correct information. Knowledge sharing is certainly more about providing people with the connections to quickly and simply contextualize and sort through information. Thanks for your very insightful comment.
April 24th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
[...] encontré un comentario interesante en el blog Uncommon Knowledge sobre el vÃnculo entre la gestión del conocimiento y la innovación. De la manera como yo lo entiendo, el asunto va más o menos asÃ: en tanto somos bombardeados [...]