Innovation, Knowledge Management, and Survival in the Galaxy
- Gal Morad
- Mar 1, 2004
- 4 min read
Believe it or not, in 1952, when KM was just an abbreviation for kilometer, and even that only on the French side of the world, Isaac Asimov wrote a science fiction story about innovation and knowledge management.
"Foundation" has become, over the years, one of the classics of science fiction literature. But the basic ideas on which it is based are gaining momentum precisely now in the information age.
In the year 11,988 of the Galactic Era, the Galactic Empire is at the height of its development. The planet Trantor is a single, vast city situated on a steel mantle, home to 40 billion people whose entire occupation is maintaining a massive system of government and administration.
The Empire is an unstoppable Corporate entity that controls tens of thousands of star systems, has enormous economic power that appears to be in constant growth according to every known stock index, and lacks no resources for investment in research fields.
At the Central University of Trantor sits a scientist named Hari Seldon. Seldon is developing a new scientific field called "psychohistory." The mathematical models of psychohistory enable the prediction of social and economic trends thousands of years into the future, unlike the ancient social sciences, which could only analyze past events through statistics.
Hari Seldon discovers a small and troubling trend. Within the Empire, every professional field is becoming information-intensive. For people to perform their work, they need to specialize in a very narrow field of knowledge. The connection between knowledge domains is increasingly reduced to a few interface points. On the other hand, new technological ideas are created through interaction between domains, so that in practice, innovation and renewal processes have stopped!
At the research institute established by Seldon, psychohistory scientists analyze the future using complex mathematical models and reach the conclusion that without innovation, the Empire's core technology will deteriorate, the large and cumbersome Empire will struggle to control the periphery, the Empire's resources will tempt small and flexible star systems, the galactic economic bubble will collapse. Within 500 years, the Empire will reach destruction.
What then does Hari Seldon do to save the galaxy from destruction?
He establishes the "Encyclopedia Galactica" institution, an encyclopedia that will store all the accumulated knowledge in the galaxy. In other words, he is appointed as the galaxy's knowledge manager.
Even today, in knowledge-intensive organizations, the amount of information needed to perform a role is constantly growing. Evidence of this can be seen in the growth of new professions such as "web designer," "information specialist," "software integration engineer," or "software tester." Until recently, a single person performed all these tasks; today, each requires a unique specialization. The formation of new professions is a result of professional specialization within organizations.
In the information age, there is constant growth in the knowledge required to perform a role, and therefore, positions require longer training periods. Knowledge-intensive organizations across all industries are being compelled to specialize more deeply in narrower fields.
A side effect of the professionalization process is the emergence of islands of professional knowledge within the organization. Professional knowledge that was once concentrated in a single person is now distributed among multiple individuals or departments. Therefore, performing tasks requires many coordination processes, and innovation processes based on information integration may be damaged.
Innovation sounds like a futuristic and distant word, but in practice, its meaning is everyday. Innovation or creativity, in its simplest definition, is the new existence of something that wasn't there before.
Innovation processes encompass all the activities within an organization that produce new knowledge from existing information. Innovative products are those that distinguish an organization from its knowledge in books, between an experienced person and a new employee, and between an organization and its competitors. In practice, innovation is the primary driver of growth for any organization.
If we don't learn to connect these knowledge islands, coordinate between different factors, integrate information from various fields, and foster knowledge interaction, the organization's ability to produce unique knowledge with competitive value will be compromised.
Knowledge management activities within the organization play a crucial role in this context. These activities are inherently not limited to one profession or sub-profession. Knowledge management agents, like knowledge managers or consultants, are positioned with a broad perspective on the organization. Knowledge management activities, such as organizational portals, knowledge communities, insight repositories, and document repositories, are processes that create connections between the knowledge of people with different roles or sub-specializations.
The goal of all these processes is to bring the right knowledge at the right time to create new knowledge that will translate into real value for the organization - that is, to enable innovation and creativity.
In the toolkit of knowledge management managers and consultants, there are additional tools whose declared purpose is innovation and creativity.
One of these tools is virtual brainstorming. Virtual brainstorming can occur spontaneously during professional community activities. However, the activities of innovation and creativity initiated through virtual interaction are still not widely adopted in organizations, despite virtual brainstorming being studied in universities as early as the early 1990s.
One of the surprising and consistent findings in these studies is that virtual brainstorming is more effective than face-to-face groups.
In organizations, such a group has additional advantages: a virtual group connects people in distant locations, saves work time (try calculating how much it costs to have 8 engineers sitting and waiting for their turn to speak in a brainstorming meeting), and its products are preserved for use by future generations.
Isaac Asimov understood as early as 1952 that the greatest asset of any organization is its knowledge, which is not static but dynamic and continually renewed. However, a lack of management of this asset or its dispersion can lead to its depletion.
In contrast, we are only beginning to understand today the potential inherent in the connection between knowledge management, innovation, and economic survival.
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