In advocating for innovation it seems as though “innovation happens” is the mindset carried by many mistaken adherents to the cause. You just have to trust it and it will come, they say (or not). This is the equivalent of saying “magic happens” when faced with a “Mechanical Turk”. Data goes in one end, magic happens, and a desired output comes out the other end. I’m sorry – innovation is not based in gold-pooping unicorns, nor is it something that should be left to the whims of inevitability or caprice. Innovation needs to be specifically and studiously fed a fuel of knowledge in order to succeed. And if knowledge is the fuel, then knowledge management is the engine that drives innovation.

It’s not what you know, it’s what you do with what you know
Of central importance is the changing nature of competitive advantage – not based on market position, size and power as in times past, but on the incorporation of knowledge into all of an organization’s activities.
- Leif Edvinsson Swedish Intellectual Capital Guru

When Peter Senge defined The Fifth Discipline (as opposed to The Fifth Element) in 1994, one of the tenets of embracing the concept of becoming a “learning organization” was the use of effective knowledge management. Knowledge management in his model was a way to accelerate the performance of the organization so that it might better think holistically and systemically, and thereby design better solutions to its challenges faster. It required that organizations not only attract and retain bright people, but that they harness the thinking of those bright people in such a way that their efforts could be captured and populated across the organization.

The issue with knowledge in organizations is not that it isn’t available; the problem is that knowledge is not readily available at the time and point of need. As this dilemma relates to innovation, it is an even bigger issue. Innovation places huge knowledge demands on organizations. To be truly effective it must reach across all knowledge sources both internal to the organization and increasingly, thanks to open innovation practices, external to it. Knowledge must be easily and freely available for recombinant thinking approaches and to be applied directly to pressing challenges. Unfortunately, many knowledge management solutions sacrifice ease and access to the twin overlords or taxonomy and ownership.

Permission-based knowledge management systems, the ones that sequester information into functional groups with associated administrative and rights management restrictions, do not foster and promote the kind of knowledge transfer for which the learning organization calls. They kill it. Is there a place for intellectual property protection and management? Absolutely. But knowledge management need to head towards greater freedom to be of better value for innovation.

Groups filled with big brains and bright ideas applied to thorny issues equals…
Imagination is more important than knowledge
- Albert Einstein

What is the promise of knowledge management? For one thing it enables organizations to leverage their tacit knowledge more broadly among their members. By applying knowledge management to key data sources, and capturing the experience of organization members in an explicit and coordinated manner, the opportunities to decrease the innovation cycle time are correspondingly increased.

To better coordinate knowledge management, via systems and processes not only technologies, user-led innovation communities may be created. Innovation communities when people within an organization who work together explore and create new approaches and then implement them. They are usually a subset of communities of practice or information communities (both of which are commonly tied to functional expertise.) Communities of practice are communities or networks of individuals and/or organizations that coalesce around an information commons, usually a body of knowledge that is open to all on equal terms. The Project Management Institute is one such community of practice.

Knowledge management will never work until corporations realize it’s not about how you capture knowledge but how you create and leverage it.
- Etienne Wenger

From communities of practice, innovation communities may form to directly apply their shared knowledge in new and interesting ways. As the costs of diffusing knowledge are getting steadily lower, as computing and communication bandwidth expand, the geographic dispersion and cultural diversity of these groups may increase, too. This makes the notion of having the big brains all in the same room for innovation to occur (e.g., the Manhattan Project) is no longer a necessity. But as a proponent of both knowledge management and face-to-face communication (and relationship-building) I see a place for them both to continue to coexist.

Dick Brandon once said that, “documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is still better than nothing.” In a sense, knowledge management exists in a similar vein. Some, no matter how rudimentary, can be helpful in the development of innovation. The challenge is to “wire up” knowledge so that it is readily available to inform innovation practices, such as, design thinking, ethnographic study, and prototyping. That process is often best addressed at the human interface level.

The innovation wisdom of individuals, crowds, communities, countries
Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an ass.
- Japanese proverb

The purpose of knowledge management is to help an organization marshal and management it’s knowledge for the best gain. Knowing who to connect and what to connect them to is a part of the wiring up previously mentioned. It takes a clear understanding of the social network at play in an organization to understand who those people might be that can most benefit from both access and connection. It takes a form of organizational wisdom that many organization’s lack.

In a previous post I discussed a variety of impacts that may be felt through an over-reliance on the formal power resident in the organization chart. Knowledge management cannot fall prey to the turf battles that organization charts so often represent. Instead it must be liberated so that the cross-pollination often necessary for the greatest innovations might occur. Because even if you manage your knowledge careful – you organize it, structure and store it, within an inch of perfection – if people aren’t using it to help make your organization more effective, efficient, and successful, what’s the point. A better filing system is not the heart of creativity. But knowing and using what you know?

There’s genius lurking in those files. It is just waiting for the right people to use it.

There’s no such thing as knowledge management; there are only knowledgeable people. Information only becomes knowledge in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it.
- Peter Drucker