Knowledge management (KM) is the collection of methods relating to creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.
Organizational learning is the process of creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge within an organization. An organization improves over time as it gains experience. From this experience, it is able to create knowledge. This knowledge is broad, covering any topic that could better an organization. Examples may include ways to increase production efficiency or to develop beneficial investor relations. Knowledge is created at four different units: individual, group, organizational, and inter organizational.
Knowledge transfer is the sharing or disseminating of knowledge and the providing of inputs to problem solving. In organizational theory, knowledge transfer is the practical problem of transferring knowledge from one part of the organization to another. Like knowledge management, knowledge transfer seeks to organize, create, capture or distribute knowledge and ensure its availability for future users. It is considered to be more than just a communication problem. If it were merely that, then a memorandum, an e-mail or a meeting would accomplish the knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer is more complex because:
Tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge—as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge—is knowledge that is difficult to express or extract, and thus more difficult to transfer to others by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. This can include personal wisdom, experience, insight, and intuition.
Activity theory is an umbrella term for a line of eclectic social-sciences theories and research with its roots in the Soviet psychological activity theory pioneered by Sergei Rubinstein in the 1930s. It was later advocated for and popularized by Alexei Leont'ev. Some of the traces of the theory in its inception can also be found in a few works of Lev Vygotsky. These scholars sought to understand human activities as systemic and socially situated phenomena and to go beyond paradigms of reflexology and classical conditioning, psychoanalysis and behaviorism. It became one of the major psychological approaches in the former USSR, being widely used in both theoretical and applied psychology, and in education, professional training, ergonomics, social psychology and work psychology.
Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "think for a living".
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities and the way in which these processes support work activities. It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning. It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM).
Explicit knowledge is knowledge that can be readily articulated, codified, stored and accessed. It can be expressed in formal and systematical language and shared in the form of data, scientific formulae, specifications, manuals and such like. It is easily codifiable and thus transmittable without loss of integrity once the syntactical rules required for deciphering it are known. Most forms of explicit knowledge can be stored in certain media. Explicit knowledge is often seen as complementary to tacit knowledge.
The knowledge-based theory of the firm, or knowledge-based view (KBV), considers knowledge as an essentially important, scarce, and valuable resource in a firm. According to the knowledge-based theory of the firm, the possession of knowledge-based resources, known as intellectual capital, is essential in dynamic business environments. These resources contribute to lower costs, foster innovation and creativity, improve efficiencies, and deliver customer benefits. Collectively, they are considered key drivers of overall organizational performance. The proponents of the theory argue, that because knowledge-based resources are usually complex and difficult to imitate, different sources of knowledge and intellectual capital can be seen as the main sources for a sustainable competitive advantage.
Jeff Sutherland is one of the creators of Scrum, a framework for product management. Together with Ken Schwaber, he presented Scrum at OOPSLA'95. Sutherland contributed to the creation of the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Along with Ken Schwaber, he wrote and maintains The Scrum Guide, which contains the official definition of the framework.
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning. Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice.
Knowledge sharing is an activity through which knowledge is exchanged among people, friends, peers, families, communities, or within or between organizations. It bridges the individual and organizational knowledge, improving the absorptive and innovation capacity and thus leading to sustained competitive advantage of companies as well as individuals. Knowledge sharing is part of the Knowledge management process.
Ikujiro Nonaka is a Japanese organizational theorist and Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy of the Hitotsubashi University, best known for his study of knowledge management.
Georg von Krogh is a Norwegian organizational theorist and Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and holds the Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation. He also serves on Strategy Commission at ETH Zurich.
Text and conversation is a theory in the field of organizational communication illustrating how communication makes up an organization. In the theory's simplest explanation, an organization is created and defined by communication. Communication "is" the organization and the organization exists because communication takes place. The theory is built on the notion, an organization is not seen as a physical unit holding communication. Text and conversation theory puts communication processes at the heart of organizational communication and postulates, an organization doesn't contain communication as a "causal influence", but is formed by the communication within. This theory is not intended for direct application, but rather to explain how communication exists. The theory provides a framework for better understanding organizational communication.
In social science research and organizational psychology, boundary spanning is a term to describe individuals within an innovation system who have, or adopt, the role of linking the organization's internal networks with external sources of information. While the term was coined by Tushman, the concept was being developed by social scientists from the late 1950s onwards. Most of the early work was conducted in large American corporations with well-established R&D laboratories. The term has since been used in relation to more general innovation networks.
Knowledge management is a multidisciplinary business model that seeks to explore and provide models and concepts. Knowledge management has its roots in many disciplines, such as business, economics, psychology, and information management. The goal of knowledge management is to promote the achievement of organizations' goals, competitiveness and competitive advantage through long-term processes by utilizing the intangible capital of companies and organizations. In modern times, social media in particular has grown and become more widespread as part of corporate business, while becoming part of people’s daily lives, both in and out of work. Modern social media has become a part of everyday business, which is why companies strive to focus on social media and its use as part of their business. Social knowledge management seeks to explore this discipline, as part of a larger entity of knowledge management.
eXtreme Manufacturing (XM) is an iterative and incremental framework for manufacturing improvement and new product development that was inspired by the software development methodology Scrum and the systematic waste-elimination (lean) production scheduling system Kanban(かんばん ).
Cognitive assets are tangible and intangible organizational assets that constitute sources of the cognition that is necessary for action coordination. These assets allow for the integrity and efficiency of the multiple conversions of individual knowledge into organizational knowledge.
Hirotaka Takeuchi is a professor of management practice in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. He co-authored The New New Product Development Game which influenced the development of the Scrum framework.
