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312 Chapter 9

Organizational culture

KM strategy

Assess

Knowledge capture Knowledge sharing
KM team
and dissemination
and/or creation

Contextualize

Knowledge acquisition
and application
Update

KM technologies

Figure 9.1
An integrated KM cycle

The two most commonly encountered objectives of knowledge management are
innovation and reuse. Innovation is closely linked to the generation of new knowledge
or new linkages between existing knowledge. It is a popular misconception, however,
to think that innovation occurs in isolation — in fact, innovation rests fi rmly on a large
body of accumulated experiences, both positive and negative, based on what has
worked and what has not worked in the past. Creativity often involves lateral thinking
such as seeing an analogy in a completely different context. Similarly, reuse is often
mistakenly equated with dull, routine, and unproductive work. In actual fact, reuse
forms the basis for organizational learning and should be viewed more as a dissemina-
tion of innovation.
An evolutionary framework begins to emerge in which new knowledge in the form
of innovations eventually ends up becoming incorporated into organizational memory
to form the object of reuse so that the benefi ts of this new knowledge, know-how,
can be spread throughout the organization. The KM strategy provides the basic build-
ing blocks used to achieve this organizational learning and continuous improvement
so as to not waste time repeating mistakes and so that everyone is aware of new and