Organizational success depends less on products and more on the appropriate use and deployment of distinctive capabilities. The true core competence of any firm is the ability to create new knowledge, learn continuously, identify and solve changing problems. Interest in knowledge is being driven by:

• Greater and faster connectivity and information flow due to the internet - ideas at the speed of light!

• Increasing knowledge content 'intelligence?' in products and services
• Decreasing life-cycles and time to market for industrial products
• Hyper competition and innovation pressures on a global scale
• Strong business focus on innovation driven growth after cyles of down-sizing and lean production.
• Critical need to be flexible, nimble and 'in-tune' with your market.

What is KM?

There is no easy and accepted answer here. The problems around defining KM are also part of its strength and allure. KM is emergent, it takes on different forms, shapes and strategies in different firms and may not even look the same across groups within the same firm. It pays to take time and to have conversations to surface assumptions & beliefs, build alignment and share understandings around what knowledge means to your firm. There are a number of positions you can take to mix and match these for yourself. Most have ties to how you think about knowledge and what you believe knowledge really is! Consider your choices with care:

• Approach: Personalization vs. codification

• View: knowledge as an object vs. knowledge as flow or dynamic
• Emphasis: tacit vs. explicit
• Strategy: internal vs. all stakeholders
• Nature: existing vs. emergent / constructed
• Focus: reuse vs. creation / innovation
• Culture: eastern vs.western
• Attenion: external (business intelligence) vs. internal (learning)