KM, Innovation, Synergies and Creativity

Knowledge must evolve to keep step with changes in the environment or else it loses value. Innovation is all about deriving R&D programs from market experience, creativity processes opening new horizons blend with commercial innovation to sustain customer relationship and intimacy.

Innovation is viewed as a knowledge creation process. It is also the creation of any product, service, or process which is new to business unit. While innovation is often associated with major product or process advance, the vast majority of successful innovations are based on the cumulative effect of incremental change in products or processes. Innovation becomes the outcome of management that is strategic and leadership that is visionary. Innovation can become an organizational way of life through the skillful management of people, structure, values and learning.

Innovation can be radical or incremental. These innovations have such different competitive consequence because they require quite different organizational capabilities. There is growing evidence that there are numerous technical innovations that involve apparently modest changes to the existing technology but have quite dramatic competitive consequences. Capabilities are defined with two types of knowledge :

• component knowledge that are knowledge in relation with the components of a product. A component is a physically distinct portion of the product that embodies a core design concept.
• architectural knowledge that are knowledge in relation with the way components are integrated and linked together into a coherent whole in the system.

The challenge for executives is to build congruent organizations both for today's work and tomorrow's innovations. Organization need to have sufficient internal diversity in strategies, structures, peoples and processes to facilitate different kinds of information and to enhance organizational learning.

Knowledge management is a key issue in this whole.

Effective knowledge creation depends on an enabling context, which is a shared space that fosters emerging relationships. Based on the Japanese idea of Ba: or Place, (Nonaka, 1998), such an organizational context can be physical, virtual, mental, or all three. This context is crucial because of knowledge is dynamic, relational and based on human action.

According to Nonaka, organizational knowledge creation involves five main steps

1. Sharing tacit knowledge: the process starts when members meet to share their tacit knowledge. A self-organizing team facilitates organizational knowledge creation through the requisite variety of the team members who experience redundancy of information and share their interpretation of organizational intents.
2. Creating concepts: based on its ability to share tacit knowledge, the team creates a new product concept. At this stage, the concept may be a specification of functionality, a, algorithm, a new way of marketing products or how to reach new sales channels...
3. Justifying concepts: the team involving outside participants, justifies the concept. Cost, profit margin, but also the relation with the organization, its strategy and its culture...Members used market studies, benchmarking, customers focus groups, the company's expressed vision, to built arguments for the concept.
4. Building a prototype: the concept is transformed into a prototype. The general goal is to create a tangible manifestation of the team's knowledge.
5. Cross leveling knowledge: The team assumes the responsibility for sharing its knowledge with the organization at large, including manufacturer and marketing groups.

New, revitalized or adapted knowledge is definitively a source for innovation. KM may be a key enabler as a company innovation pattern. Royal Deutch (Shell) use it for strategic planning and Bohme (Physicist) introduced a special practice for searchers to discover new perspectives with echoing reflective dialogs.

One can imagine a KM 'company' practice, articulated around various knowledge flows, stemming core knowledge, developing and pruning pilots, weaving products and marketing threads, linking people, linking new business with a systematic customer value creation target in mind.

Such a program, looking for systematic knowledge flows connections, may be a good opportunity to kill devastating discrepancy generated by silo minded organizations, creates a common context with customers and partners, hence building a real marketing advantage and rooting the company into the community.