American Productivity & Quality Center 2003, ISBN-10: 1928593798. This report, based on the tenth consortium benchmarking on knowledge management (KM) conducted by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), explores how innovative organizations manage their knowledge and how to approach KM to drive innovation.
Innovation is important to all organizations in all sectors, whether for-profit, government, or nonprofit. In an economy powered by knowledge workers, the better use of knowledge can lead to faster, less risky, and more vibrant innovation. In technical organizations such as many of those studied by APQC, knowledge is often the raw material as well as the product of their work. Do these organizations — known for their innovation — create, manage, or leverage their knowledge more effectively or differently than other organizations? Is the way they manage knowledge part of the reason these organizations are so innovative? The study team has found the answer to be a resounding yes.
With input from the study’s sponsors, APQC has found that organizations are interested in how innovative organizations manage knowledge in domains and functions one would expect to be related to innovation, such as R&D and new product development. Also, many organizations want to know how to address structural and cultural barriers to KM in technical and research settings and how leaders can support the adoption of new behaviors to overcome barriers. Other critical factors are enabling the flow and use of knowledge across boundaries and promoting collaboration in virtual settings. Measurement is a major challenge for most organizations, who want to learn how to measure changes in the rate and value of innovation resulting from increased knowledge sharing and collaboration and want to measure time saved and mistakes avoided through reuse and sharing of knowledge.
This report chronicles the value that innovative organizations find in better managing the flow and reuse of knowledge, effective practices to enhance knowledge creation and reuse for innovation, and implications for other organizations that might wish to better nurture knowledge and its flow to accelerate and enhance innovation.
Study Focus
This report is the culmination of a collaborative research effort conducted over a six-month period that involved 30 sponsors and seven best-practice partner organizations. These organizations joined with APQC to find best practices in using knowledge management to drive innovation. The study’s approach was to gather data on current knowledge-related innovation policies and practices from both sponsors and partners and then to study the partners in detail. In order to understand whether or not KM should be approached differently if innovation is the desired outcome, the APQC study team gathered data around five scope areas: 1. how to foster a supportive culture and communicate the link among KM, innovation, and business strategy and results;
2. how to enable collaboration in order to create and share new knowledge;
3. how to establish support roles and structures, including key leadership, community, and individual roles, the role of the KM organization, and the role of subject matter experts;
4. how to engage the educational and training functions and incorporate strategies to recruit and train new employees to support knowledge creation and innovation; and
5. how to measure the success of consciously managing knowledge in support of innovation