Knowledge Democracy as the New Mantra in Product Innovation

In this chapter we carry out a critical analysis of “knowledge democracy” as a new mantra or buzz-word in product innovation leadership. A new paradigm has revolutionized the traditional process of invention, which was previously associated with a hierarchical dissemination of new ideas and competitive hoarding of knowledge assets. This chapter contends that at this environment has been replaced by a collaboration economy (based on so-called “wikinomics”) in which democracy governs the process of knowledge creation and its strategic application. Leadership in product innovation does not rely on the innate internal qualities of organizations, but on the collaborative contribution of stakeholders in many of the activities that make up the NPD lifecycle. The authors suggest a new approach to mitigate factors that can otherwise reduce the value of the NPD process. The chapter then examines how to promote such open collaboration through the development of a new managerial mindset, the acquisition of new distinctive competences, the development of new organizational models, and the management of new collaborative technologies. The authors’ proposed framework of processes and competencies offers the potential for organizations to meet these needs.

An Ontology-Based Expert System for Financial Statements Analysis

Financial statements provide the main source of information for all parties who are interested in the performance of a company, including its managers, creditors, and equity investors. Although each of these parties may have different perspectives when viewing financial statements, all parties are concerned with the financial quality of an enterprise, which requires carefully analyzing financial statements to estimate and predict future conditions and performance. When analyzing financial statements, due to the complexity of the task, even professional analysts may be subject to constraints of subjective views, physical and mental fatigue, or possible environmental factors, and are not able to provide consistent appraisals. As a result, researchers and practitioners have resorted to expert systems to imitate the decision processes and inferencing logics of financial experts.

Does Knowledge Management Really Work?

Contemporary organizations, including those involved with healthcare, are constantly under pressure to produce and implement new strategies for delivering better products and/or services. Knowledge Management (KM) has been one of the paradigms successfully applied in such business environs. However, a lack of proper application of KM principles and its components have reduced the confidence of new adopters of this paradigm. KM-based healthcare projects are moving forward, and innovation is the driving force behind such initiatives. This chapter sets the scene by outlining the KM’s core elements, facets and how they can be appropriately applied within an innovative, real-time healthcare project. It further enumerates a case study which targets the screening attendance issue for the NHS’ breast screening program. The case study not only discusses the need of a balanced approach to address both the technological and humanistic aspects of KM, but also answers the question “Does knowledge management really work?” A questionnaire-based study was conducted with the General Physicians (GPs) on the KM’s aspects and its relationship to the interventions proposed in the study. The study provided ample proof that a balanced approach will definitely increase the efficacy of such initiatives. Such studies can increase the confidence of future KM adopters in healthcare domain. This chapter provides credibility for such balanced KM-based initiatives and highlights the importance of a focused approach on the various facets of KM to maximize benefits.

Knowledge Management under Institutional Pressures

This chapter explores how knowledge management, an enabler of change due to its knowledge creation capability, is subject to several forces that shape its processes and outcomes. A qualitative analysis based on data from a case study of the first major rollout of smartcard technology in France shows how institutional isomorphic pressures affect not only knowledge management processes but also resulting innovations. Government impetus, legal authorities, and cultural expectations in French society produced coercive isomorphic pressures on the credit card industry, while existing credit card solutions, systems, and standards played the role of mimetic pressures, and professional networks and network externalities acted as normative pressures. The study suggests that a systems perspective which acknowledges these institutional isomorphic pressures can lead to greater strategic alignment and can provide a basis for meaningful differentiation and competitive advantage.

Knowledge Management

The proliferation of ICT (information communication technologies) throughout the business environment has lead to exponentially increasing amounts of data and information generation. Although these technologies were implemented to enhance and facilitate superior decision making, the result is information chaos and information overload; the productivity paradox (O’Brien, 2005; Laudon & Laudon, 2004; Jessup & Valacich, 2005; Haag et al. 2004). Knowledge management (KM) is a modern management technique designed to make sense of this information chaos by applying strategies, structures and techniques to apparently unrelated and seemingly irrelevant data elements and information in order to extract germane knowledge to aid superior decision making. Critical to knowledge management is the application of ICT. However it is the configuration of these technologies that is important to support the techniques of knowledge management. This chapter discusses how the process oriented knowledge generation framework of Boyd and the use of sophisticated ICT can enable the design of a networkcentric healthcare perspective that enables effective and efficient healthcare operations.

Holonic Management

The aim of an innovative management is to intentionally create a “chaos edge” and to foster and organize the ideas which are born. Chaos edge is a term usually used in complexity studies, but it is also highly applicable to management. In this paper, the management concept used to create innovation is referred to as “Holonic management.” Holonic management requires the following three elements: 1) cultivating the soil from which innovation shoots can grow, 2) introducing an appropriate competition principle, and 3) preparing a strict evaluation and proper support system. Constructing the field of chaos edge in holonic management can activate an internal environment to create ideas, which result in the internal cooperative work possible to generate innovation. The “Heretic management” finds the innovation shoot created by a minor group within a corporation and allows it to grow without fear of failure. This is not just the most effective tool. It is also the method for the realization of knowledge management.

Recognizing Innovation through Social Network Analysis

Advances in communication technologies have enabled organizations to develop and operate decentralized organizational structures by supporting coordination among workers in different locations. Such developments have lessened formality in control structures and replaced formal channels of communication with less formal social networks. The chapter describes the development and application of a ‘Social Network Scorecard’ (SNS) managerial tool to monitor social interchanges and relationships within and across organizations in order to assess the effectiveness of knowledge networks. In this chapter, a project team made up of individuals from academia and industry collaboratively implemented an integrated technological platform for KM, e-Learning, e-Business, and project management disciplines in a higher education environment. This VeBMS platform, consisting of a collaborative working environment within the University of Salento, Italy, was used as a ‘test bed’ to evaluate the validity of the scorecard in practice. The chapter describes how the SNS tool can help in monitoring the evolution of an organizational community, recognizing creative roles and initiatives, and tracing the connections between such initiatives and innovative outcomes. Looking at trends at individual, team, inter-organizational, and organizational levels, researchers identified the most innovative phases within the team’s life cycle using network indicators like density and degree centrality. The SNS provided feedback on the effectiveness of the team and helped discover the phases in which the team acted in a manner conducive to innovation. The Virtual eBMS project team followed the typical structure of an innovative knowledge network where learning networks and innovation networks co-exist with a more sparse interest network.

Exploiting KM in Support of Innovation and Change

This chapter emphasizes the importance of formally promoting close social interaction and open knowledge sharing to achieve superior innovation capability. It does so by discussing the advantages of developing Communities of Innovation and citing a case study that exemplifies these concepts. This chapter addresses the challenges and opportunities faced by businesses in today’s complex and often unpredictable business environments. For success, an organization must be able to combine and recombine their resources in novel ways, eliminating or reconfiguring resources that are no longer relevant, and acquiring new resources. An organization’s capability to change by manipulating resources continuously and rapidly—to innovate—is a competitive advantage that is not readily imitated by competitors. Innovation is critical to an organization’s viability since it enables the development and introduction of new products and services and thus enables an organization to maintain, or improve, its current business position. The chapter reviews the numerous theories of change and change management in the literature based on practice and precept. However, research shows that competitive advantage is increasingly located by authorities in an organization’s intellectual resources including the skill base, business systems and intellectual property of its employees: its Human Capital. Organizational innovation depends on the individual and collective know-how of employees, and innovation is characterised by an iterative process of people working together, sharing insights, and building on the creative ideas of one another. The chapter emphasizes that an organization’s intellectual resources have significant potential to realize innovation and change capabilities, but that the impact of these capabilities largely depends on the means of an organization to foster close community social interaction and open knowledge sharing, and to leverage its informal leadership as a precursor to and part of any related Knowledge Management (KM) initiative.

Culturally-Bound Innovation in Romanian Teaching and Research Hospitals

This chapter discusses innovation in the Romanian healthcare sector, from the point of view of organizational learning, which is influenced by the components of organizational culture. Starting from the premise that hospital organizational culture differs from other types of organizations, we investigated the perceptions of a mixed sample of doctors and nurses from an internal medicine clinic of a large teaching and research hospital. The Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire and items selected from a questionnaire developed by the authors were used in order to study how the two groups perceived organizational culture and, subsequently, innovation, as both a component and a result of it. The results of the study show differences in perception between physicians and nurses, consistent with the ones presented in literature, and account for which facets of hospital organizational culture affect learning easiness versus which factors are negatively correlated with it.

Knowledge Management Profile

For knowledge-intensive organizations, it is important to carry out an objective assessment of their current position in the area of knowledge management activities and processes. Uncertainty presents a barrier to the introduction of suitable activities for improving knowledge management. We believe that the results of the research will be significant to practice and will provide substantial support for leaders and managers. Moreover the right knowledge management activities can help push thinking beyond the everyday in a way that spurs innovative creativity. To ensure success and long-term existence of any organizations effective application of organizational knowledge and knowledge management practice is of critical importance. Besides simply assessing the benefits inherent in knowledge management, the organizations must learn to recognize and manage the different areas of their knowledge management practice. Our innovative solution, the “Knowledge Management Profile” is devoted to the formulation of a new knowledge management maturity model, which is believed to be of vital importance in the quest of the successful knowledge management practice.