Time is flying and a lot of things has happened. This week my main concern was to work on the factors for the knowlegdge flow and the selection of case studies. Furthermore i worked on the project management issues like this weblog and the project wiki (link).

The question i try to answer is how companies can learn from the outside. As i believe we are entering the network era, i assume that a company should leverage external knowledge in for example innovation processes. The competency to learn from other sources than only internal is vital for a next era of competition and cooperation. To be able to analyse this process of learning from the outside i decided to split it in four different stages:

Knowledge IDentification
Knowledge INterpretation
Knowledge TRansfer
Knowledge APplication

Knowledge Identification
This is the stage that a company identifies what kind of knowledge they want to learn from the outside. This identification is based on an assessment of the current internal capabilities, compared to what they know what is available in the outside world.

Knowledge Interpretation
However, not everything that is available in the outside world is also useful for a company. In the Knowledge interpretation phase we therefore align the results of the knowledge identification phase with our business goals. I.e. we make sense of what we would like to learn, and answer the question for ourself: “What do we want to do with this knowledge, why is it essential to acquire this knowledge?”.

Knowledge Transfer
Now the real work starts. We know what we want to acquire, and why we want to acquire it. But how are we getting it? Via various knowledge transfer tools a company can facilitate this phase. One of the articles i’ve read last week was mentioning the fact that knowledge should be seen in three different levels: low, medium and high-intensive knowledge. This categorization has impact on what mechanisms you should use in transferring the knowledge.

Knowledge Application
Vital for a succesful learning from the outside is the actual use of the acquired knowledge. A familiar situation is that a company is not able to leverage the learned knowledge and facilitate e.g. new innovations with it. Knowledge application therefore is about the dissemination of knowledge in the organisation.

In these four stages (as a reminder: IDINTRAP) the process of learning from the outside is modelled. Although i am aware of the fact that this framework is not a perfect representation of the reality, i hope this will enable me to analyse a couple of case studies.

At this moment i cannot mention the chosen case studies, but i’ll report later on them.

As a side project i would like to introduce my project-wiki to you. This wiki will act for myself as a notepad, where i will put down my thoughts, and main findings of some articles. However, as my thesis is about learning from the outside i would be very happy if you as the readers of this weblog would contribute to the wiki. Feel free to create or edit pages, i will soon also upload information about how to work with the wiki, but it should be very easy to use.

so please be welcome and feed me with ‘external knowledge’! link to project-wiki

This entry was posted on Friday, May 12th, 2006 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Progress report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.