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Introduction to Knowledge Management 19

Table 1.2
Knowledge management milestones

Year Entity Event
1980 DEC, CMU XCON Expert System
1986 Dr. K. Wiig Coined KM concept at UN
1989 Consulting Firms Start internal KM projects
1991 HBR article Nonaka and Takeuchi
1993 Dr. K. Wiig First KM book published
1994 KM Network First KM conference
Mid 1990s Consulting Firms Start offering KM services
Late 1990s Key vertical industries Implement KM and start seeing benefi ts
2000 – 2003 Academia KM courses/programs in universities with
KM texts
2003 to present Professional and Academic KM degrees offered by universities, by
Certifi cation professional institutions such as KMCI
(Knowledge Management Consortium
International; information available at:
http://www.kmci.org/) and PhD students
completing KM dissertations

By the early 1990s, books on knowledge management began to appear and the fi eld
picked up momentum in the mid 1990s with a number of large international KM
conferences and consortia being developed. In 1999, Boisot summarized some of these
milestones. Table 1.2 shows an updated summary.
At the 24th World Congress on Intellectual Capital Management in January 2003,
a number of KM gurus united in sending out a request to academia to pick up the KM
torch. Among those attending the conference were Karl Sveiby, Leif Edvinsson, Debra
Amidon, Hubert Saint-Onge, and Verna Allee. They made a strong case that KM had
up until now been led by practitioners who were problem-solving by the seat of their
pants and that it was now time to focus on transforming KM into an academic disci-
pline, promoting doctoral research in the discipline, and providing a more formalized
training for future practitioners. Today, over a hundred universities around the world
offer courses in KM, and quite a few business and library schools offer degree programs
in KM ( Petrides and Nodine 2003) .

From Physical Assets to Knowledge Assets
Knowledge has increasingly become more valuable than the more traditional physical
or tangible assets. For example, traditionally, an airline organization ’ s assets included
the physical inventory of airplanes. Today, however, the greatest asset possessed by