Knowledge Management for Innovation
We had a successful meeting of the BQF Innovation Unit today in London where the topic was Knowledge Management for Innovation. Professor Michael Kelleher gave a comprehensive explanation of KM. Some of the points he made were:
- The cost of ignorance is high. NASA and the British Nuclear Industry both lost important early knowledge.
- You should align your KPIs to achieve innovation through KM
- Corporate Yellow Pages allow you to find key skills and experiences
- Employees need to be motivated to share expertise so put it into objectives and appraisals
- ‘After-action reviews’ and ‘lessons learnt’ need to be captured
- Organisational story telling is a key part of KM
- To help with innovation we need a searchable corporate memory of past failures as well as successes
Martin Fowkes, who is responsible for KM at Taylor Woodrow then covered what they are doing in this field. When it comes to innovation the Taylor Woodrow motto is - Think, Prove, Do. (Many other companies operate - Think, Analyse, Reject.) They promote innovation through physical innovation notice boards and an innovation buddy system. Before they bid on a new tender they search their knowledge base to look for relevant experiences. They then run workshops to generate innovative approaches.
There was a discussion on related topics. Many participants use Microsoft’s Sharepoint for KM. Blogs and wikis are increasingly important tools.
If you are a member of BQF then Pat Myles can supply copies of the Powerpoint presentations from the day.
Next Meeting will be on July 30th in London with the topic - Competency Traps - presented by Arthur D Little. More details will follow.
Paul Sloane
Tags: blog, corporate, Innovation, km, knowledge, learning, lesson, management, memory, NASA, sharepoint, story, telling, wiki
May 1st, 2008 at 9:14 am
Paul, in the beginning of your interesting posting you write:
“The cost of ignorance is high. NASA and the British Nuclear Industry both lost important early knowledge.”
Can you elaborate on that, please – perhaps with a couple of examples?
Thanks very much in advance.
May 1st, 2008 at 12:00 pm
As I understand it NASA did not record all the details and calculations for the early moon missions. If they wanted to do it again they would pretty much have to start from scratch. The British Nuclear industry built a range of reactors but most of the engineers involved have now retired and the detailed knowledge of how they did it has been lost.