Idea in Brief
The Problem
Most of us work in the knowledge economy, but few companies have a clear understanding of which knowledge “assets” their future will be built on.
The Research
It’s instructive to map your most important knowledge resources along two dimensions:
- Is it tacit or codified?
- Is it restricted or diffused?
The Takeaways
To create value and growth, you can develop tacit knowledge, help spread expertise where it’s needed, put old knowledge to new uses, or spot connections between different spheres of expertise.
When executives talk about “knowledge management” today, the conversation usually turns very quickly to the challenge of big data and analytics. That’s hardly surprising: Extraordinary amounts of rich, complicated data about customers, operations, and employees are now available to most managers, but that data is proving difficult to translate into useful knowledge. Surely, the thinking goes, if the right experts and the right tools are set loose on those megabytes, brilliant strategic insights will emerge.