Posted by Reilly Atkinson on August 01, 2002 at 17:07:10:

In Reply to: Knowledge Sharing Incentives posted by T. Malik on July 21, 2002 at 20:24:31:

T. Malik -- Thanks for your kind words below.

In my opinion, there is a lot of theory thrown your way, but not much on the practical issue of how to promote knowledge sharing in a successful fashion. And that is odd, at least to me, as the basic problem you face is virtually identical to that faced by marketers and market researchers.

At the practical level, the best way to proceed is to talk to people, which can be done in many different formats. Why do people share? What do they share? With whom do they share? Why don't they share? Do they sometimes share and sometimes not? (We are talking sharing or not sharing knowledge.)

This can be done with informal conversations, or structured ones, or via survey, or focus groups, and so on. These are all time-tested approaches to probing the "mind of the consumer or provider". And they are constantly being used today - yesterday and tomorrow. And there are a wide range of analytic techniques available, from simple tabulation or frequencies, to machine parsing of text, to perceptual mapping, including conjoint analysis. The tools are there, are well tested, and at least minimally helpful.

The plain fact is that the knowledge sharing "problem" can certainly be thought of as a marketing problem. So use marketing methods to attack the problem.

Talking to people will be far more useful than dwelling on theory. Also, forget any ideas of simple causal patterns. Chances are that you will discover "knowledge sharing" segments, each of which behaves according to different criteria -- there is no single solution. And some of these segments may almost overlap.(I know all this from many years of market research and requirements analysis, and practical business experience.)

Regards,
Reilly

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