Posted by Riva Gianluca on January 12, 2002 at 04:43:06:

In Reply to: Re: History of Knowledge Management posted by vinayak gadgil on January 11, 2002 at 13:05:41:

Hi Vinayak,
luckily I've noted your message. Well, wht exactly would you like to know?
It's not really clear who invented the label of Knowledge management: we can say the prehistory of the movement deals with Drucker (who firts used the term of knowledge worker) and Sveiby (speaking in 1987 about knowledge firms, intending with the term the service sector in general). The year of the actual born is definitely 1995. In that date the highly influential book of Nonaka & Takeuki (The knowledge creating company) came out, delivering the well-known theory of the possible conversion between explicit and tacit knowledge with a spiral process. In the same year Sveiby, working at the Swedish insurance company Skandia, published the so-called "Navigator", attempting to measure the intellectual capital of the firm. Two currents were born: the proper knowledge management boomed in USA, at the same time with Internet. The concept of explicit/tacit knowledge was not at all new, because there was a seminal work by Polany (Tacit knowledge) in the '60. The new idea of Nonaka was the possible conversion, since in Polanyi's view that conversion was not possible. Nonaka consider possible to convert tacit knowledge by socialization, but afterwards with the concept of "BA" he recognized a possible role for IT to enable the explicitation of tacit knowledge. The Intranet-mania was getting around...Nonaka has been quite smart because in his book he compared american companies with japanese, in a time in wich the American were quite scared about their asiatic rivals.
The work of Sveiby was quite influential for the foundation of the intellectual capital movement, wich claims to measure and assess the intellectual capital of a firm. He was the right man in the right place, since Sweden has always tried to introduce some alternative form of business practice. The intellectual capital report became a little faddish, with many companies publishing several indexes often unrelated to one another (for istance the percentage of female employees is considered part of the intellectual capital...)
The Intranet/Database system revealed a little useless for the bottom line: it delivers information wich needs to be interpretated to turn into knowledge.
The third wave has Wenger as its king. He published a book in 1998 wich make the concept of community of practice popular. His ideas are that knowledge is developed through social and spontaneous communities, drived by common interests and passions, whereas innovation lies in the interaction between different communities. He thinks that knowledge is not a community which brainwash people, but the interaction between an individual and different communities,since every individual takes part in several communities...
Nowadays the new idea is trying to connect intellectual capital and the so-called social capital. Social capital (not a new concept either, as it's been used for years by sociology) is the quality and the depth of trusted realtionships in a social context. Many scholars now states that knowledge needs combination of different sources, and this combination would be possible only if both intellectual capital and social capital are present.
hope helps, Best Wishes

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