I recently participated in the International Benchmarking Forum (IBF) featuring Dan Ranta, Director of Knowledge Sharing (KS) at ConocoPhillips. He covered how from 2004 to the present, KS has documented hundreds of millions of dollars in estimated cash flow for the company. I heard Dan at the Forrester’s Content & Collaboration Forum last September. I was very impressed with his work and wrote this post - Creating Global Knowledge Sharing Networks at ConocoPhillips.
Paul Miller of IBF interviewed me as part of my role as a guest commenter. We discussed, in part, knowledge markets as I had written a post on the topic a few weeks ago - Internal Knowledge Markets: A Framework for Success. If knowledge are done right I think these markets can have a positive impact on organizational culture, in general. But I want to put them into perspective before diving into another example.
Knowledge markets are really KM 1.9. That is they are still focused on the collection of knowledge. How do you get people to actively participate in providing and sharing knowledge, This is not a bad thing and likely will remain very relevant for a long time. But now we also have KM 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 or social business, whatever you want to call it. Because of the transparency of the collaborative tools, knowledge is often captured as a byproduct of work. There is not extra work and you do not need to provide any extra incentives. Now the task moves from collection to curation. How do you make sense of the massive amount of knowledge that is simply flowing into the enterprise? Note I said KM 2.0 because this mode is in its very infancy unlike KM 1.9.
Returning to knowledge markets, the new collaborative tools can certainly help in this space also. KM 1.9 can benefit from KM 2.0. Another name for knowledge markets, is crowd sourcing and I want to offer another example that has enterprise implications. Many knowledge markets provide incremental improvements to known problems. But what if you want to do to help find the next big thing?
Cisco’s I-Prize is a great example that both created a knowledge market but also used social tools in the process. While it looked outside the firm for innovation, the same methods could be used inside the enterprise. In the initial phase, the contest attracted more than 2,500 entrepreneurs from 104 countries who presented 1200 ideas. The ideas were posted on the public site and others could promote or demote the idea. New teams were also formed as people saw potential partners with similar ideas. Cisco also encouraged this.
To participate in phase two, 32 ideas were selected. In some cases existing teams carried them forward and in other cases new teams were formed. A third of these teams were multi-national like the winners. These teams were given Cisco's collaboration portfolio to brainstorm their initial ideas, collaborate on the business plan, and virtually present their ideas to Cisco. In the third, and final phase, twelve teams carried forward. They were given a lot of support and each had a Cisco team mentor who worked with them to further develop their business plan. At this phase, there was much more interaction with team via telepresence. There was a new emphasis on the people, as well as the idea, as the winners were to be offered jobs at Cisco as part of their prize, along with funding to develop their idea.
The winning team contained two Germans and a Russian, They looked at the ways to using the network as the platform for visibility, manageability and, ultimately, optimized control of energy-consuming systems. I offer this as another way to view knowledge markets with potentially less fine tuning of the market incentives.
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