Every firm has knowledge, and managing that knowledge is very important to enable innovation. So we want to ask, the question is, how can knowledge management enable innovation? How does it work to help innovation? And why should we care about this? Innovators should care about knowledge management, because innovation is the combination and synthesis of knowledge into new and unique patterns. And so knowledge is the basis for which a good innovation will emerge. And innovation firms really use knowledge management approaches to become more efficient at managing that information. And it's particularly important in scientific and technical domains where the knowledge is very vast and new and changing and so it needs to be managed. And the ability to build lessons learned, and re-learn concepts is very important with knowledge management, because concepts are always changing, and new concepts are emerging, and so that needs to be managed as well. And so here are five ways that knowledge management can support innovation. Leveraging access to expert knowledge, facilitating collaboration across boundaries, supporting an innovative culture and augmenting innovation team efficiency, and finally reducing time to market for an innovation. We'll look at each one of these things individually. First, let's look at how leveraging access to expert knowledge is important. Firms with complex products or services have a diverse base of expertise. Lots of different people with lots of different expertise and professional domains. And so, when you have that diversity, you need to really bring it together in some way. And so, social networking tools serve as a way to enable knowledge exchange and knowledge interaction within the firm itself. How people can be talking to one another from their diverse professional expertise. And it also enables experts to become more visible and accessible. With the knowledge management system you can identify who the expert is for any given topic. Another aspect of knowledge management is facilitating collaboration across boundaries. When you facilitate collaboration that's essential for innovation. And teams ultimately work together and they leverage each other's knowledge and leverage each other's expertise. So when expertise is shared, both within and across boundaries, that is the way innovation can happen. And new ideas ultimately emerge from people like partners, business partners, business suppliers, and even customers. And so, if you have a knowledge management system that captures those ideas that come in from alliance partners, then you have a way to build collaboration. And communities of practice are actually formed around different bodies of knowledge. And those communities of practice are the ways in which expertise and knowledge resides within the organization itself. And so here's another aspect, supporting an innovative culture. How does a knowledge management system support an innovative culture where senior leadership communicates some kind of a vision about the necessity to support a knowledge management system? What you do is you enable and reinforce collaboration, you clarify recruitment for talent that you're going to hire, and if you have an knowledge management system, you'll know what the holes are, where your talent is missing, what talent you need for certain kinds of innovations. And you can identify and link related expertise and talent with a knowledge management system. So, you can also augment innovation teams' efficiency. And when you have innovation teams that need knowledge that is located in the firm, sometimes it takes a lot of time to find that information. And studies have actually indicated that knowledge of employees in particularly innovative firms spend almost 30% of their general workday searching for information. And so just think of how you can augment innovation team efficiency by a good knowledge management system that captures innovative ideas, innovation opportunities, lessons learned, all of those factors that make hunting for information much more efficient. And so knowledge management systems, in that way, they reduce the time spent looking for expert knowledge, expertise, and lost information. And you can also manage knowledge so the duplication of expertise is avoided. You ultimately can reduce the time to market with a knowledge management system. And because the time to market actually often determines the market share for an innovation, a knowledge management system helps avoid what we call the organization's amnesia or selective memory. Sometimes without a system, people think about and forget about mistakes that have been made, and after action reports are never done, and so that knowledge is never really captured. But with a knowledge management system you can do that. And you can enable, for instance, new product teams to come up to speed quickly. And avoid repeating past failures. This is very important especially for new product development teams where without a knowledge management system, they essentially start from a blank slate, and so that takes a lot longer. So, the takeaways about knowledge management system for innovation and why it's important, is that knowledge management systems, they create a platform for sharing expertise and creating an opportunities for collaboration. And they build a knowledge base that the firm can work with. And it also helps firms avoid repeating mistakes. And you chronicle lessons learned, and you build the expertise and the knowledge that you've experienced in your firm. And then finally, it enables firms to make smarter and faster decisions and get their innovation to the market place sooner.
