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.
The Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, as well as executive education. Its degree programs are among the most selective in the world. MIT Sloan emphasizes innovation in practice and research. Many influential ideas in management and finance originated at the school, including the Black–Scholes model, the Solow–Swan model, the random walk hypothesis, the binomial options pricing model, and the field of system dynamics. The faculty has included numerous Nobel laureates in economics and John Bates Clark Medal winners.
The Eclipse Foundation AISBL is an independent, Europe-based not-for-profit corporation that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community, with legal jurisdiction in the European Union. It is an organization supported by over 350 members, and represents the world's largest sponsored collection of Open Source projects and developers. The Foundation focuses on key services such as intellectual property (IP) management, ecosystem development, and IT infrastructure.
Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include ICT Professionals, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "think for a living".
Eric von Hippel is an American economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work in developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation. In order to describe this phenomenon, in 1986 he introduced the term lead user.
Arthur Robert von Hippel was a German American materials scientist and physicist. Von Hippel was a pioneer in the study of dielectrics, ferromagnetic and ferroelectric materials, and semiconductors and was a codeveloper of radar during World War II.
User innovation refers to innovation by intermediate users or consumer users, rather than by suppliers. This is a concept closely aligned to co-design and co-creation, and has been proven to result in more innovative solutions than traditional consultation methodologies.
LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is a facilitation methodology developed at The Lego Group. Since 2010 it is available under an open source community-based model. Its goal is improving creative thinking and communication. People build with Lego bricks 3-dimensional models of their ideas and tell stories about their models. Hence the name "serious play".
Open innovation is a term used to promote an information age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have been noted and discussed as far back as the 1960s, especially as it pertains to interfirm cooperation in R&D. Use of the term 'open innovation' in reference to the increasing embrace of external cooperation in a complex world has been promoted in particular by Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor and faculty director of the Center for Open Innovation of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss.
Lead user is a term developed by American economist Eric von Hippel. His definition for lead user is:
- Lead users face needs that will be general in a marketplace – but face them months or years before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them, and
- Lead users are positioned to benefit significantly by obtaining a solution to their needs and so may innovate.
Amar Gupta is an Indian computer scientist based in the United States. Gupta has worked in academics, private companies, and international organizations in positions that involved analysis and leveraging of opportunities at the intersection of technology and business, as well as the design, development, and implementation of prototype systems that led to widespread adoption of new techniques and technologies. He has surmounted several strategic, business, technical, economic, legal, and public policy barriers related to several innovative products and services.
The Carr–Benkler wager between Yochai Benkler and Nicholas Carr concerned the question whether the most influential sites on the Internet will be peer-produced or price-incentivized systems.
The term private-collective model of innovation was coined by Eric von Hippel and Georg von Krogh in their 2003 publication in Organization Science. This innovation model represents a combination of the private investment model and the collective-action innovation model.
In management, Joy's law is the principle that "no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” attributed to Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. Joy was prompted to state this observation through his dislike of Bill Gates' view of "Microsoft as an IQ monopolist." He argued that, instead, "It's better to create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals. If you rely solely on your own employees, you’ll never solve all your customers' needs." Core to this principle is the definition of smart within the context of the quotation. Smart "refers to capability but not willingness to work for someone." Furthermore, "the fact that you are smart for one company does not make you smart for another." Richard Pettinger, Director of Information Management for Business, UCL The law highlights an essential problem that is faced by many modern businesses, "that in any given sphere of activity most of the pertinent knowledge will reside outside the boundaries of any one organization, and the central challenge [is] to find ways to access that knowledge."
Karim R. Lakhani is the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is the principal investigator of the Crowd Innovation Lab at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science. His research and teaching focuses on open innovation and user innovation. Lakhani is the founder and one of the principal investigators of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).
Geoffrey G Parker is a scholar whose work focuses on distributed innovation, energy markets, and the economics of information. He co-developed the theory of two-sided markets with Marshall Van Alstyne.
Sven Constantin Voelpel is a German organizational theorist and Professor of Business Administration at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, known for his work in the field of strategic management, business models and knowledge management.
Susumu Ogawa is a professor of Innovation and Marketing, Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University, Japan.
Dr. Carliss Y. Baldwin is an American economist and the William L. White Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Her book on modularity in complex technological systems, Design Rules, published in 2000 and co-written with Kim B. Clark, has been called "a landmark book" that has impacted research on organization theory, competitive strategy, and innovation.
Gudela Grote is a German psychologist and academic. She was educated in Germany and the United States, and established her career in Switzerland.
