| Over the last few years, both knowledge management and management
learning (including e-learning) have received sufficient coverage in
publications. I am glad to refer, amongst others, to my own publications
with Gert Van der Linden: The Hybrid Business School: developing
knowledge management through management learning (Prentice Hall,
2000); and Virtual Corporate Universities: a matrix of knowledge and
learning for the new digital dawn (Kluwer Academic, 2003). However,
most books/articles are often based on one prevailing focus (be it human
resources, IT, strategy, evaluation of intellectual assets), and most of them,
if not all, based on a very rational, mechanistic view of knowledge
management. Practice, on the other hand, has taught us that knowledge
management and learning are highly holistic concepts, difficult to grasp in
any particular subfield, emergent, constantly changing. Measurement and
rationalisation have lead to a very technology driven development of
knowledge management that in practice (in companies) has often failed.
Therefore, there is a need for research and publications embracing that
holistic focus on knowledge management, covering a wide range of
interesting areas (ranging from learning in the workplace to knowledge
infrastructure, via e-learning, knowledge representation, innovation and
learning, knowledge culture and learning, knowledge technologies, etc).
With that aim, a number of companies (Philips, SaraLee/DE, Achmea,
Atos/Origin and Microsoft) have sponsored a research team, under my
direction, for a period of five years, in order to explore new approaches in
knowledge management and learning which have practical relevance. The
companies shared a common interest: how can we avoid reinventing the
wheel every day, and how can we learn faster from past experience in order
to avoid repetitive error? The immediate field of action was very often the
improvement of innovation management. |
