12 SPOKEN-ABOUT KNOWLEDGE Why It Takes Much More than Knowledge Management to Manage Knowledge

Abstract

S POKEN -A BOUT K NOWLEDGE : W HY IT TAKES MUCH MORE THAN ‘ KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ’ TO MANAGE KNOWLEDGE ? Niels Christian Nielsen and Maj Cecilie Nielsen 1 1. Knowledge – the reality challenge Unimerco a/s is a company depending on knowledge for its success. For CEO Kenneth Iversen - and for all of his colleagues in Unimerco - leading, managing, and developing knowledge processes internally and with suppliers and customers is a dominant aspect of every single workday. This is hardly surprising. After all Unimerco is a company operating at the forefront of industrial development, and ‘knowledge’ seems to be the central concept in almost any discussion about what is new at this forefront. Not least in the European discussion, it has become established convention to talk about the knowledge-based economy. This again is reflected in an abundance of academic writing, consulting service offerings, and IT-products aimed to understand knowledge and knowledge processes and to assist companies in handling knowledge. The surprise is that all of these contributions play little or no role in Unimerco’s efforts to master the knowledge challenges. The conceptualization of knowledge in dominant academic theory and consulting service offerings seem to be disconnected from the challenge of mastering knowledge in the competitive reality of a pioneering company. The aspiration of this article is to at least sketch an understanding of knowledge that has the potential of real usefulness for companies. To achieve this we take the long road back to the theoretical foundations of the concept of knowledge in order to set the definition straight. This will lead us to identify and correct some of the predominant misconceptions. More importantly, it allows us to outline a new framework for understanding knowledge. Based on that, we suggest some directions for dealing with the present reality challenges of companies like Unimerco. We perform a preliminary test of the framework against our observations in Unimerco, and we outline some of the next steps which we believe can re-align theory with practice and lead to useful results for companies. In the process we confront two of the dominant trends in the theory of knowledge as it pertains to companies. Mainly, we deal with ‘knowledge management’ as it has become known since the early 1990s in the academic debate, but especially as it has gained The article has been produced as part of the EU funded FP5 project Tracking the New Economy Transformation (IST-2001-37325). The theoretical insights are the result of joint discussions based on the draft manuscript of N.C.Nielsen’s forthcoming book on the political economy of the knowledge society. The empirical work on Unimerco was carried out by M.C.Nielsen as part of a CBS team project. It should be disclosed that N.C.Nielsen is a non-executive member of the Unimerco Board.