Legal Research

Are Creation Spaces KM?s Future?

By scott

“most knowledge managers lost sight of the fact that the real value is in creating new knowledge, rather than simply “managing” existing knowledge.”

Interesting article on the Harvard Business Review blog by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown (Deloitte) entitled “A Better Way to Manage Knowledge”

They explore the idea of ‘creation spaces’ (and looked at how people work together and pool knowledge in World of Warcraft, for example) and why these and not traditional KM systems are the best way to leverage knowledge.

Their view is summed up by the following quote: “Knowledge management systems desperately try to persuade participants to invest time and effort to contribute existing knowledge with the vague and long-term promise that they themselves might eventually derive value from the contributions of others. In contrast, creation spaces focus on providing immediate value to participants in terms of helping them tackle difficult performance challenges while at the same time reducing the effort required to capture and disseminate the knowledge created.”

An interesting idea, and one which I feel has a lot of merit; however it also seems to be throwing up an either / or option that shouldn’t exist. Surely the true value is created by having both creation spaces and also a method for capturing the output of those spaces as well as any ‘existing knowledge’. I sound like a broken record on this but as I have said many time before, in relation to Law Firms, knowledge is what we sell ? we don’t sell law. A case in point , we have examples of agreements/licences that have long been out of date in relation to UK law, but suddenly become gold dust when dealing with emerging market companies starting to go through similar processes that the UK did 20 years ago etc ? I’m not convinced a creation space would capture this, whereas the boring old KM system did and has.

Anyway, the article is well worth a read.

Full post as published by Information Overload on January 20, 2010 (boomark / email).