Knowledge Management - Research

Research

KM emerged as a scientific discipline in the earlier 1990s. It was initially supported solely by practitioners, when Skandia hired Leif Edvinsson of Sweden as the world’s first Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO). Hubert Saint-Onge (formerly of CIBC, Canada), started investigating various sides of KM long before that. The objective of CKOs is to manage and maximize the intangible assets of their organizations. Gradually, CKOs became interested in not only practical but also theoretical aspects of KM, and the new research field was formed. The KM ideas taken up by academics, such as Ikujiro Nonaka (Hitotsubashi University), Hirotaka Takeuchi (Hitotsubashi University), Thomas H. Davenport (Babson College) and Baruch Lev (New York University). In 2001, Thomas A. Stewart, former editor at FORTUNE Magazine and subsequently the editor of Harvard Business Review, published a cover story highlighting the importance of intellectual capital of organizations. Since its establishment, the KM discipline has been gradually moving towards academic maturity. First, there is a trend towards higher cooperation among academics; particularly, there has been a drop in single-authored publications. Second, the role of practitioners has changed. Their contribution to academic research has been dramatically declining from 30% of overall contributions up to 2002, to only 10% by 2009 (Serenko et al. 2010).

A broad range of thoughts on the KM discipline exist; approaches vary by author and school. As the discipline matures, academic debates have increased regarding both the theory and practice of KM, to include the following perspectives:

• Techno-centric with a focus on technology, ideally those that enhance knowledge sharing and creation.
• Organizational with a focus on how an organization can be designed to facilitate knowledge processes best.
• Ecological with a focus on the interaction of people, identity, knowledge, and environmental factors as a complex adaptive system akin to a natural ecosystem.

Regardless of the school of thought, core components of KM include people, processes, technology (or) culture, structure, technology, depending on the specific perspective (Spender & Scherer 2007). Different KM schools of thought include various lenses through which KM can be viewed and explained, to include:

• community of practice (Wenger, McDermott & Synder 2001)
• social network analysis
• intellectual capital (Bontis & Choo 2002)
• information theory (McInerney 2002)
• complexity science
• constructivism (Nanjappa & Grant 2003)

The practical relevance of academic research in KM has been questioned (Ferguson 2005) with action research suggested as having more relevance (Andriessen 2004) and the need to translate the findings presented in academic journals to a practice (Booker, Bontis & Serenko 2008).