Category: Unlocking and Leveraging Knowledge

How you can use Slack and MS Teams to foster knowledge management and information sharing

I am a member of several Slack and MS Teams workspaces, and I am often struck by how little organisations I work with invest in making these digital workspaces valuable instruments to nurture ideas, develop knowledge in a distributed way or share information in a way that saves people time. 

I prefer Slack over Teams, but that is just my opinion. Many of the teams I work with do not have much of choice as their IT departments prefer MS Teams because of its integration with other Microsoft applications.

Digital workspaces as places of sharing information and coordinating activities

Many of these digital workspaces of the organisations I support are almost used more as an extended SMS/Whatsapp communication platform than as an instrument for accumulating knowledge fragments or a distributed learning platform. What I mean is that even when teams have different channels configured, the content of these channels is often more like a short message service. Occasionally documents, URLs or photos are shared, sometimes with a note explaining why people should bother to read it, and other times without any contextual information. There are often long periods between posts, followed by a flurry of activity as the importance of topics increases or wane.

When users express frustration with these platforms, it is usually because they cannot find the right channel to post their contributions to. Or they find the thread structure to be confusing. I find it annoying when people do not reply in a thread of a question, as it clutters a channel with statements that are incoherent and messy. For me, these workspaces are valuable repositories not just of decisions made or actions taken but about context and arguments for and against specific courses of action.

A few drawbacks of digital workspaces

A drawback is that both MS Teams and Slack only allow for a one-level deep threaded conversation, which is very shallow. So, I can reply to your post, but if somebody comments on my reply, then their message is at the same level in the thread as mine. Perhaps this is a good thing because I do not miss the 10-level deep-threaded conversations on the old bulletin boards. Another drawback is that people can quickly shoot down any contributions that somebody else has made without substantiating their claims or contributing to the building out of the idea. I guess this is a challenge with all social media.

Despite these drawbacks, digital workspaces offer an opportunity for teams to improve how they accumulate and develop shared ideas in ways that exceeds what is possible when people are physically working together. Furthermore, these platforms enable teams to both to converge around shared ideas and thematic areas while also encouraging broader scanning and information sharing. By encouraging people to surface small ideas (or weak signals) from within their work domains and the topics they are interested in, new combinations of knowledge modules and ideas can be combined and further developed. By encouraging people to share information, news, photos, impressions and developments from beyond the organisation, potential new networks, topics and trends are made more visible. It thus enables both convergences of interests in the form of deeper conversations and the continuous adjustment of shared mental models while simultaneously encouraging divergence and the exploration of signals from beyond the immediate operational focus of the organisation. It helps a lot if people not only share a link or a document, but a paragraph or a short commentary and what they found interesting or who they think would benefit from reading it.

Workspaces intending to build a community and strengthen its members

In some of the digital workspaces I am active in, the workspace has an intent that goes beyond chatting and just sharing interesting links or documents. Rather, the intent is to build communities around different ideas, topics and activities, and to encourage the members to not only use the content shared in the workspace, but draw in members to contribute to, challenge ideas and use the information shared in their daily practice. In these workspaces, there are channels where people share ideas, links to videos and links to articles that are relevant to many members. But members can ask for help, share personal updates, form their own channels or just visit a channel out of curiosity. What I like about these workspaces is that people don’t just share short messages, they write short essays or mini-blogs about a given topic. And then somebody else writes a response in the form a a short essay. So, when somebody shares a link to a resource, they usually explain why they thought it was interesting or valuable to share. You can read these channels and benefit from the cumulative and unfolding exchange that happened over hours, days or even months.

Some ideas on making the navigation of channels easier

In the better-working shared workspaces there are often channels that are maybe more relevant to sub-groups that are interested in specific topics or themes. Still, these groups are open, so others can observe or just follow the conversation, or leave when they lose interest or have other priorities. I call these topical channels because I can join one of these channels and get an idea of what the sub-community is discussing, what questions people have about the content, and how dynamic the contributions to and uptake of ideas are. Over time, these channels become valuable repositories of ideas, information and resources. (Did you know that Slack is an acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge” that was coined by its founder Steward Butterfield?)

I have found that it works well to make a distinction between topical channels, where content, ideas and concepts are discussed, and projects, where people have to work together and where the discussion combines content but also correspondence around dates, tasks, reminders and other project-related chatter. It is not so practical to combine a project channel (that might require fast and frequent communications) with the slower process of exchanging on the content or accumulating different perspectives on a given subject. Whenever I am asked to curate workspaces, I try to split the operations (projects) from the subject or content (topical) channels and also from the more focused or private channels where just a few selected people participate in.

How we organise our channels in Mesopartner

In our Mesopartner Slack workspace, we have denoted channels for topics by starting the channel name with “tp”, “proj” and “Support”. 

  • Tp is for topics that some of us are interested in, like #tp_innovation_systems or #tp_facilitation. 
  • Proj represents projects that we are working that is focused on certain projects that some of us are working on. 
  • Support is where we help each other for instance #support_apps_software, #support_online_meetings or #support_slack. 

Because our enterprise spans over countries and timezones, we also have a series of channels for admin, contracts and sharing of travel plans. For instance, I usually check the the #travel channel first every day because all our members share itineraries there. We often share photos and impressions from the places we visit and the people we work with.

My favorite channel is #working_out_loud, where we all regularly share with others what we have planned for the day, and what is in our minds as we start a day. I make a point of posting a message everyday about “what is on my mind this morning” or “what tasks I have dedicated myself to today”. This is not only of interest to my business partners, it even helps me to keep track of my commitments, and my mental state over time.

During the COVID lockdowns we had a #coping_with_covid channel that had a mix of humor but also more serious content in it. After the lockdowns ended, this channel was renamed to #coping_with_external_shocks, and we typically share news from the environments or places where we are working in that channel. 

Beyond sharing – workspaces as decentralised decision-making and knowledge development platforms

Beyond using these workspaces for communications and information sharing, these platforms can be valuable for organisations where the workforce is distributed across space. I recall listening to a podcast interview of Shane Parish with Matt Mullenweg that made a deep impression on me. Matt is the founder of WordPress and Automattic. During the interview, he explained how they used a WordPress-based platform called P2 to enable work teams to develop code, manage projects and make decisions over dozens of timezones and locations in a distributed manner. From Matt, I heard about the concept of asynchronous meetings, where meetings are recorded (in video with transcripts) so that employees in other locations/timezones could listen to the meetings at their own time and then contribute their ideas, suggestions, questions and contributions in the P2 workspace. Matt argues that the idea that everybody must be present to participate in online or physical meetings is a relic of the past. I really love this idea, but I have not worked with any organisation yet using this form of decision-making and content development. But if you think of it, COVID has digitised so many workplaces so fast, yet we still hang on to these old rituals of scheduled meetings, decisions made during meetings, etc.

Perhaps more within our reach is the WordPress approach of using internal blogs or short essays on their P2 workplace channels for technical teams running development projects to share updates, reflect on code, to pose questions and to set priorities. Matt argues that this is very important in their organization, that is both global and yet very local. To make this work, we have to shift from working in shared documents (like MS Word) to working in shared workspaces in the form of blog posts, comments and questions in our topical channels. WordPress uses these internal essays or blogs to transfer updates, progress, snags and experience from one area/timezone/topic to others. It is a cumulative way of building on the ideas expressed by others.

In closing

You may wonder why I wrote a whole blog post about this topic. For me, this post is about reflecting on how most of the organisations I work with develop ideas together and foster shared knowledge development. Most organisations I work with describe themselves as knowledge-intensive, their employees are called knowledge workers. They are promoting the uptake, development and dissemination of new knowledge and technology in the environments they work in. I must be honest; quite a few of the organisations I work with are terrible at fostering ideas, turning concepts into knowledge modules, keeping track of external developments or having any form of distributed knowledge brewery going on. No wonder their workspaces are not the primary place where their people not only learn, but contribute to and get inspiring ideas from.

I run for the door when asked to share a success story, write a case study or contribute to the results management system, and so do many others I know. This is an extremely formal way of capturing knowledge that often leaves out the most important arguments and alternatives that had to be explored along the way.

To be effective in what we do as knowledge intermediaries is that we have to start by fostering workspaces where people can nurture ideas, share information, challenge and contrast ideas, and have deep conversations that allow for the emergence of more coherent mental models and knowledge modules. Not everybody can explain themselves in a meeting, and the online workspace allow people to take their time to organise their thoughts, or to just drop a concern, question or a contribution into a larger conversation.

Building a knowledge community that builds its members is a cumulative process enabled by digital workplaces provided by Slack and MS teams (and WordPress P2 and others). These online workspaces that are now almost ubiquitous are one of the most powerful tools at our disposal to foster distributed cognition, idea nurturing, decentralised creation, history of ideas tried and ongoing knowledge module development. Matt Mullenweg would argue that these workspaces enable distributed decision-making that is far more inclusive than our traditional ways of making decisions, arguing in real-time, and requiring everybody to be present when information is shared, alternatives are explored, or decisions are made.

Let me know how you are going to challenge the way your organisation’s digital workspace supports the generation of brewing of new ideas and concepts, the scanning of the horizon for threats, opportunities and weak signals of change, and perhaps even enabling a more distributed form of alternative development, decision-making and information sharing.

The image for this blog post is titled “Into the Jaws of Death — U.S. Troops wading through water and Nazi gunfire”, circa 1944-06-06”. It was taken by Chief Photographer’s Mate (CPHoM) Robert F. Sargent.

This image or file is a work of a United States Coast Guard service personnel or employee, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image or file is in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 101 and § 105, USCG main privacy policy and specific privacy policy for its imagery server).

Exploring the gaps between universities and industries

When working on technological change and the improvement of innovation systems, the topic of the different gaps between universities and industries often comes up. This is true for South Africa, but also for my work in Europe and Asia. The gaps are described differently by development projects, academics and business people, and my job is to usually figure out where the opportunity to close these gaps lies.

In my experience of trying to close some of these gaps, it is important to be as specific as possible about nature and maybe even the effects of these gaps. It is important to go to businesses and to find out what they expect from universities, while also going to academics and researchers and finding out what they expect from the industry. Often, the expectations expressed by these two groups are unreasonable and hard to reconcile. Sometimes people are simply wrong about what they think is needed or should be done.

However, these different expectations are not the biggest obstacle to closing the gap. Often the bigger obstacle is a lack of imagination of what is even possible in terms of cooperation, interaction and information flow. This is made worse by low levels of trust by one side of the other side. Also, stakeholders often have little insight into how others value certain interactions and information flows.

Over the last 14 years I have worked occasionally with a Faculty of Engineering at a University of Technology. In the image below, I share some of the different interaction patterns that we have observed over the years of closing gaps between selected departments or technology centres and industries. I am grateful to Dr SJ Jacobs who agreed that I can share this illustration.

The possible different relations between universities and industries

Of course, some relationships are more important than others. Also, not everybody agrees with the direction of the arrows that I have used in the diagram. I also know that some academics find it hard to believe that they can learn from industry. At the same time, many business people are surprised when they realise that their own companies have learned through the personal relations of their employees with their alma mater.

Even if a certain relationship adds little value in the bigger scheme of things, for the people directly involved it could mean a lot. For instance, for an engineering student to find an industry project that they could work on as a research project is a big deal, even if this may not be so important for a company or even for the academic department involved. In many post-graduate degrees, students are required to work on a real-life project, which often requires a company to give a student access to their facilities, data, senior management or other resources.

To reflect on the relations between a university and a community or a region would require another picture, but I will do that in a next project.

To be transparent, for many years I have used a simpler version of this map that was developed by the late Jorg Meyer-Stamer in the early 2000s. I include the original map below. I think many of my readers might have seen this map in RALIS (Rapid Appraisal of Local Innovation Systems) training course material or RALIS diagnostic processes.

The original map developed by Jorg Meyer-Stamer

While this original map is still useful to explain the different kinds of interactions between the private sector and a university, I found that we need a more detailed diagram if we want to improve relationships, design new services or improve the performance of programmes.

What do you use to map the relations?

What are some of the common myths or gaps that you come across often when you work on this topic?

How to use remote team collaboration

Updated on 7 April 2020, also posted to www.innovationcoach.co.za/blog

I am supporting teams that are using Slack, MS Teams or other remote collaboration applications. Some of my clients also use Viber or WhatsApp.

In our company, Mesopartner, we’ve been using Slack for a few years. It’s not my purpose here to review these different applications, but rather to share some insights on how we and some of our clients have configured channels for conversations.

I like to look at remote collaboration tools not only as communication and coordination tools but as an essential element of strengthening knowledge development and as a learning environment. 

Wherever I am supporting teams to improve their shared sense-making and innovation cultures, I ask them to create the following channels:

#Reading and listening – here people can share what they are reading and listening to.

#Working out loud – here people can check in and explain to the rest of the team what is currently foremost on their mind. The intent is not only to inform others, but also to help the person making the post to increase their own coherence or narrative of what they are devoting their attention to and why.

Now, with the COVID-19 virus, more and more people are working from home. In our own company, we have created a channel called #Coping-with-Corona where we can all share our experiences of being in different stages of self-isolation.

We have also created groups of channels. For instance, we have a group of channels where the names all start with “support” followed by the topic. So in our “#support_mac” channel we help each other with tips, problem solving and advice, while in the “#support_blogging” channel we encourage and assist each other with blogging. 

We have groups of channels for projects and important topics, and to coordinate our internal company functions such as publications, etc.

Sometimes team leaders struggle to understand the value and function of the informal banter that often takes place in the different channels. This informal exchange is important because it makes it possible for teams to weave together explicit knowledge from the misformed or semi-thought-through statements, the half-baked ideas, the intuitions and the sarcasm that give expression to tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is often hard to express. Furthermore, tacit knowledge is often revealed when doubts or confidence are expressed, like when somebody replies “I am just not so sure about your approach”, or “Yes, you should try that, in my experience that always works”. Tacit knowledge often develops iteratively during many conversations.

The real challenge with encouraging people to share their tacit insight is that we all prefer to share our feelings and insight only with people whom we trust, or people whom we believe will be able to use our ideas. That is why reducing the chatter to only factual and precise formulations is not helpful. Often individuals will share their advice when they feel that others have shown in the past that the shared ideas are useful.

A final point. These remote collaboration tools are so useful because we can create channels when we need them, or we can close or archive them when they have served their purpose. Rather make more channels, and tolerate some cross-posting, than to have a few channels that are so busy that people fall behind in a day or two. Encourage your team members to reduce internal emails and to use the remote collaboration tools and you will immediately see an improved culture of sharing, deliberation and joint sense making.

How to cultivate a more knowledge-intensive team or organisation

It is interesting to reflect how over my career the organisations I work with have gone from trying to gather additional information from beyond the organisation to trying to make sense of all the information around them. Actually, some people I know are actively disengaging from reading newsletters, books, blog sites or other channels because they are feeling overwhelmed.

My career started in the ICT sector in the early days of connecting companies to the internet. In those days, people wanted to connect to the internet because they wanted to access some additional data, information and communications from far away. They sometimes wanted this internet connection, even if the real benefits of connectivity were fluffy and took years to realise. I shifted to the development sector in the 2000s. By then, many organisations had already started to benefit from this new connection to the information highway. The shift towards web sites, online databases, capturing learning and networks had already begun. In many of the projects I worked on, there were attempts to establish web-based knowledge portals, communities of practice, and online knowledge repositories around a vast assortment of topics. No longer was technical knowledge only available to geeks that could navigate obscure corners of bulletin boards.

Now it seems like organisations and individuals* are drowning in information. (I wonder if one could even argue that information is being reduced to data?). Folders are cluttered with documents – of which some are valuable and others not. Some documents are duplicated several times over on local hard drives, cloud drives and in inboxes. Decision-makers have more information at their disposal than they need, and they often have no idea how to figure out what is relevant or more valuable. Everything seems important, and too much content is collected and never used.

I often talk at events about how information and knowledge are critical for innovation. A culture must be fostered where what is known can be leveraged, thus supporting both continuous knowledge development and innovation. At these events, I am often told by participants that their organisations don’t have all the knowledge they need to innovate. What they need is not at their fingertips. Some express that it is crazy to propose that they start with becoming more sensitive about what they know and how they organise themselves around the knowledge they create and depend on daily. Some even claim they are not working in knowledge-intensive workplaces because people are not willing to write up what they are thinking or doing! I don’t think it is so much about documenting everything anymore. I still make for the exit when I am told that I must write up “best practices” or “lessons learnt”!

However, making better sense of what is known, and what is not understood, are critical — both for individuals and collectives. The search for complementary or necessary knowledge takes place both internally and externally. Internally, knowledge management is about continuously reflecting on what is already known by the organisation or team. It is about figuring out what to document, or what to keep in mind, or what to consider next time. Or it is about figuring out how to use what is already discovered to improve, products, services, processes and structures. Knowledge management is increasingly about being more sensitive to weak signals, responsive to new patterns and alert to odd findings. Over time, knowledge management is becoming a more distributed function as organisations become more knowledge-intensive. More and more people are somehow collecting, processing, adapting and synthesising knowledge.

The external focus of knowledge management is about tracking emerging knowledge or discovering new patterns or supplementary knowledge beyond the organisation or team. It is mainly about exploring what others already know and had the time and energy to document, or to track important developments in other domains and bringing the relevant ideas to the attention of the organisation.

To fill in the internal knowledge gaps from the outside, your team must become better at knowing what you know. This is of course only useful if you can turn what you know into value for others. If you are enabling knowledge development, you must be sensitive to what the organisation needs in the short and long term, so that information can be sourced timesously and over a time period. Teams must also understand how what they know is valuable and usable within the organisation and by its clients.

What is much harder is to get better at sensing where there are areas where more knowledge is needed, where things are not yet clearly understood or mastered. Many people I know spend a lot of time rediscovering what they already knew, or what their teams already sorted, stored or processed. This (re)discovery wastes a lot of valuable time and mental bandwidth. It often just adds more noise in the form of documents that are easily collected but rarely used or synthesised effectively.

It is easy to test how knowledge-intensive a organisation is. Ask your team where they start when they need to gain access to information they know should be captured somewhere. Do they begin internally, or do they open their browsers and start externally?

In knowledge-intensive organisations, the knowledge search starts internally. That is due to knowledge synthesising taking place and adding value to everything the organisation does. The internal search could begin with looking at data already collected, or with information captured in reports, files, photos or physical documents. Or it can start in more informal spaces, like in Slack, MS Teams or even Whatsapp or asking around in the corridors.

In knowledge-starved environments, the search for new or supplementary knowledge almost always starts on the outside. It begins in a browser or at an online resource. In these organisations, the value of improving how information is collected, organised, synthesised, evaluated is low. The pressure to use what is known, or sensed in innovative ways is also low. Improving how information is organised is simply simply not worth it. Lazy or ill-disciplined team members can undermine knowledge-intensification, because organisations have to keep legacy systems running in parallel to newer systems. For instance, some organisations communicate internally via e-mail, slack and other messaging systems. Documents are both stored in shared systems and are emailed about. This is clumsy and it reduces to ability of teams to build a coherent picture of what is going on, what is important, what needs to be maintained, expanded or deleted.

While permanent connectivity makes it much easier to search externally quickly, the habit of failing to collect, synthesise and create a more customised combination of knowledge also comes with other risks. The person doing the searching is at the mercy of tags developed by others, search rankings influenced by advertising spend, and increasingly a lot of fake news, reports, statistics. We all know that what is captured in the form of explicit knowledge is almost always far behind the curve of context-specific tacit knowledge that is hard to capture. This strategy of external search could work if your clients are less informed than you are. Besides, using search engines to find knowledge is also an art. There is also a lot of luck involved.

However, if clients want synthesised knowledge that fits their context, then organisations have to become better at enabling their own knowledge culture. Is your organisation the go-to place for certain kinds of knowledge? In a knowledge culture, it is not just about the technicalities of the search internally and externally. It is also about evaluating, refining and maintaining what is retained (and how) and how what is kept is organised or retrieved. Making it clear why something is kept or how a module can be used in combination with others is also valuable. If along the way documents are found that are no longer relevant, they are marked as unimportant and moved aside or deleted/archived.

Organisations (and individuals) also need to find a balance between documenting what is known for sure and exploring what is tacit, but not yet ready to be captured in an explicit form. This is where applications like Slack and Microsoft Teams, Trello and others are really valuable.

A knowledge culture values collecting, combining and synthesising information. It thrives on sharing hunches, talking about fears and opportunities. It is not just about proven content and technicalities. It is about:

  • constantly reflecting on what information is valuable,
  • collectively or individually thinking about which ideas, concepts or knowledge modules are used often to support decisions,
  • It is about talking about which concepts are drawn on frequently, and;
  • Exploring where explicitly captured or better-organised knowledge could be valuable for the organisation to draw on in future.

From this base, it is then easy to combine internal knowledge with different external knowledge. For me, starting the search outside is like searching for second-hand knowledge, while the raw material of ideas and insights of the internal organisation are overlooked or undervalued.

When an organisation becomes conscious of the value of their collective wisdom, far more care is taken to identify frequently used materials, modules, processes, tools, patterns, labels, thoughts and proven concepts. It is not just about the habit of collecting, sorting, storing and retrieving. It is also about reflecting on what works, what can be used better, and what kind of conversation or effort is missing. Then it becomes straightforward to combine internal knowledge with external ideas to innovate. If organisations reflect more about what knowledge is valuable and how this knowledge can best be kept alive for future refinement or use, then they will already be on their way to becoming more knowledge-intensive cultures.

*For those that are interested to know more about personal knowledge mastery, I recommend you take a look at the PKM course offered by Harold Jarche.

Strengthening the absorptive capacity of your organisation

This post is about the concept of absorptive capacity. When you are trying to improve a company, an industry, or promote innovation and learning in a region, this concept is very important. It is often poorly understood. My clients in the education sector always relate absorptive capacity to education levels. While this is true, it is only a part of the story. Business people, on the other hand, tend to focus their innovation efforts on product and process improvements, and they generally tend to not think much about their organisations absorptive capacity, nor do they think about how the environment beyond their enterprise affect their absorptive capacity.

Let me begin by unpacking absorptive capacity. My favorite recent definition is provided by UNCTAD (2014:23), where they define absorptive capacity as:

“The ability to recognize the potential value of new or novel knowledge and technology, and to transfer and assimilate it with the objective of bringing to market a product or a service. It determines if and to what extent a firm, an industry or, indeed, an economy, can use existing and new knowledge to compete”

Some researchers think of absorptive capacity as a completely distinct concept from innovation systems, but I do not agree with this. In our view technological capability (as captured by the description of the innovation system) describes the overall system dynamics: in essence at an aggregate level where it creates an ecology, whereas absorptive capacity describes the capability of individuals and smaller teams (such as a management team) within this ecology to identify knowledge gaps or new uses of knowledge, and to identify and access external knowledge and then combine it with existing knowledge. It is very hard to imagine what a dynamic innovation system would look like if it did not have strong absorptive capability at the levels of individuals, teams, organisations and networks.

This argument is based on the seminal work of Cohen and Levinthal (1990)who argued that:

  • Firms invest in basic research less for particular results than to be able to provide themselves with the general background knowledge to enable them to rapidly apply scientific and technological knowledge through their own innovations, or to respond quickly when competitors come up with a major advance. Thus firms do research to increase their knowledge base and learning which enables them to innovate when they need to.
  • The relationship between the absorptive capacity of firms and the broader technological capability present in the environment causes firms to be highly sensitive to the context within which they operate. This larger context not only provides inspirational ideas, but the implementation of the ideas depends on resources from this larger context, such as technical experts or specialists, professional, management and vocational skills, and even standards and financial or regulatory systems.

Cohen and Levinthal (1990) contend that the absorptive capacity of firms is more likely to be developed and maintained as a by-product of routine activity when the knowledge domain the firm wishes to exploit is closely related to its current knowledge base. This is different when a firm wishes to acquire and use knowledge that is more distant from its ongoing activity. The firm must then dedicate effort and resources to create absorptive capacity. It is hard to imagine how this can be done without reaching out to networks of institutions, skilled and professional employees, and networks of suppliers who are all striving to increase their relevant knowledge.

Hidalgo (2015) explains that with the increasing sophistication of technology, the ability of organisations to have all the relevant knowledge in-house is diminishing. Therefore knowledge is being increasingly spread among larger numbers of actors, who need to work together dynamically to produce and transact. Knowledge tends to flow more easily where there is a certain density of diverse actors. I have written about this often on my thinking out loud site.

This means that absorptive capacity is a dynamic capability that influences the nature and sustainability of a firm’s competitive advantage. As a side remark to policy makers, it means that incentivising R & D and then measuring patents is again only capturing half of the story. Most of the “R & D” that companies undertake are about deepening understanding, mastering variation and performance, and learning about boundaries, failure and so on.

Absorptive capacity is about knowledge and the ability to gain more knowledge, often through a process of iterative learning. Some years ago I wrote that  that this knowledge may be acquired in two different ways (Cunningham, 2012):

  1. In a solitary way where knowledge is gained through experimentation(as an individual or as part of a team) without much communication or interaction with other external actors, or through a process of deductive reasoning.Or it may involve a combination of tinkering and deduction (often referred to as deductive tinkering).
  2. By purposeful interaction with other external agents involving personal or non-personal communication with other people, specialists and knowledge sources.

The first point is mainly about absorptive capacity of the organisation or individuals. However, the second is a combination of absorptive capacity of the team, and the broader environment in which the organisation can reach out to other experts beyond its own boundaries. I argue that a large part of the knowledge a firm need is available internally, namely the knowledge of its engineers, managers, technicians and other employees.Their knowledge is partially acquired externally through previous formal training, and partially through a cumulative process of learning-by-doing. This internal knowledge, which is available at any given time, is the main innovation resource of a firm.  It is often highly tacit, which explains why firms of a particular type cluster together in regions. However, not all firms are able to tap into this internal asset, mainly because many are managed in a way that does not allow them to reflect on their own patterns of behaviour or the trends affecting their performance. When the day-to-day emphasis is on survival or routines, a tendency to under-invest in purposeful innovation activities may occur. This behaviour not only undermines the development of the internal knowledge base, but will also lead to underdevelopment of external networks that could lead to exchange or transactions with other knowledge sources.

Learning from others is only possible if the costs of interaction with peers and other organisations are low enough or if the density of networks makes this possible. One of my favourite innovation system gurus Malerba (2005:387) states that:

“knowledge is highly idiosyncratic at the firm level, does not diffuse automatically and freely among firms, and has to be absorbed by firms through their differential abilities accumulated over time.”

This accumulation often emerges through an iterative cycle combining deduction, experimentation, application, reflection, learning and adaptation between people working on the same problems, ideas or opportunities.

The implication is that in economic development we should focus on those firms, organisations and sectors that are able to innovate, and find ways to accelerate their learning journey. These are the companies that are already absorbing new ideas from their environment and beyond, and they are actively trying them out, experimenting, following or playing with ideas. They are usually not so hard to find, as they are curious about new ideas. At the same time, we must build bridges (or reduce the costs) for the rest of the economy so that future entrants and laggards can upgrade and step up and be more innovative and efficient than the incumbents, as the incumbents may also become complacent in future if new competitors do not challenge them.

For my business clients, it means that leaders must be sensitive to what their teams are learning about, and what can be done to encourage learning in the three ways I outlined earlier. I have developed a simple workshop format that I use with my coaching clients and students to asses which factors are hampering absorption and learning, and which factors are encouraging absorption.

Image credit: Images drawn by Lina Stoeckler during our annual Mesopartner Summer Academy where I usually teach on improving absorptive capacity.

Sources

COHEN, D. & LEVINTHAL, D. 1990.  Absorptive capacity: a new perspective on learning and innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly,Vol. 35(1) Pp. 128-152.

CUNNINGHAM, S. 2012. The fundamentals of innovation system promotion for development practitioners. Leveraging a bottom up understanding for better systemic interventions in innovation systems.Pretoria: Mesopartner.

HIDALGO, C.S.A. 2015. Why Information Grows: the Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. New York: Basic Books.

MALERBA, F. 2005. Sectoral Systems. How and why innovation differs across sectors. In The Oxford handbook of innovation.Fagerberg, J., Mowery, D.C. & Nelson, R.R. (Eds.), Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

UNCTAD. 2014. Transfer of technology and knowledge-sharing for development: Science, technology and innovation issues for developing countries. UNCTAD Current Studies on Science, Technology and Innovation. UNCTAD/DTL/STICT/2013/8: UNCTAD.   http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/dtlstict2013d8_en.pdf

Four functions of innovation and technology management

This article is meant for my business clients and colleagues managing technology transfer and innovation extension services.

In the past I have written much about the professionals and organisations who are responsible for helping entrepreneurs to improve and strengthen their innovation portfolios on my personal blog site.

To recapitulate: I believe that many industries are struggling to modernise because their supporting institutions use completely different frameworks to manage innovation (or perhaps the supporting institutions make their choices as randomly as enterprises do).

One of the first concepts that a tech transfer institute or industry support organisation should transfer to enterprises is “how to manage innovation and technology”. Just because there is an engineer or an MBA/PhD in a company does not guarantee effective or creative management of innovation and technology.

Today I shall focus on the four broad functions that must be managed strategically in every enterprise and supporting institution. Even if someone in the organisation has the job title of Innovation Manager or Technology Manager, these functions should still be visible throughout the organisation. In other words, this is not somebody’s job, but it helps if somebody coordinates these activities. Also, see these four functions as the minimum. More mature innovating organisations will have far more depth than these four high level headings.

The four functions agreed by most scholars and innovation experts can be summarised roughly as:

  1. Searching and scanning for new ideas and technologies, both within and beyond the organisation. This includes looking at technologies that could affect the clients of the organisation, and technologies that could disrupt markets and industries.
  2. Comparing, selecting and imagining how different technologies could impact the organisation, its markets and its own innovation agenda.
  3. Next comes integrating or deploying the technology or innovation into the organisation. This includes adjusting processes and systems, scaling up implementation, and project managing the whole change process.
  4. The last step is often overlooked, but new technology and innovation often make new ideas, innovations and improvements possible. I call this last step exploiting the benefits of a new technology or idea. This could involve leveraging some of the additional benefits or features of a technology, perhaps by creating a new business unit focused on an adjacent market or particular offering.

When I visit institutions, organisations and companies, I always ask “who is thinking about change taking place beyond your industry or key technology?”. I cannot tell you how often I hear that “the CEO” or “the production manager” are on top of new developments and will be attending a tech fair next year. How can this huge responsibility fall on the shoulders of one or two people, who are at the same time biased towards the current strategy which favours justifying past (sunk) investments? Or if you ask “How did you choose between two technologies?”  you will be surprised how little time was spent considering new business opportunities, or how few companies asked for on-site demonstrations or samples from their preferred technology providers.

I will refrain from being too critical of technology transfer institutions and industry-supporting organisations, except to say that these organisations should be a prime example to industry of how to scan, evaluate, compare and integrate new ideas and technologies. We don’t just want to see the shiny machines and neat facilities, we want to understand how you arrived at your decisions, and how you made the best of your investments after implementing the change. Furthermore, industry wants to know what’s next, or what’s beyond their vision and how it may affect their industry.

To bring it all together, the technological upgrading of industries is plagued by many different market failures. These failures include the tendency NOT to invest due to high research costs, due to fears about making the wrong choices, or because so many decisions and changes must be made at the same time – this while the business continues, markets fluctuate, and technologies change faster and faster. Companies (and institutions) cannot afford just to kick start innovation management immediately before making a change (or when forced by external forces to make a decision). These functions must be managed strategically on a continuous basis, both at the level of top management and within the different functions of the organisation. Both companies and their supporting institutions need to manage innovation and technology, not only from an operational perspective (striving for continuous improvement, etc.) but also from a strategic point of view.

Revised: Industry 4.0, IoT, 3D printing and more. Why some technologies diffuse so quickly and others don’t

I wrote this article yesterday on my thinking-out-loud site and was pleasantly surprised at the interest it sparked. My language guru Linton helped me to fix many grammar errors, so here is the revised version.

I receive questions daily about the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, 3D printing and many other technologies and whether and how I think these technologies will disrupt manufacturing and education in particular and the world in general. These questions are not only from government officials, but also from businesspeople, friends and fellow geeks.

Let me briefly state that I don’t believe it is possible to spot a paradigm shift in the future or in the present. So I would be hesitant to predict whether or when all these big changes will happen. However, when we look back we can spot shifts. Technological change typically takes places slowly but surely, and then at a certain point there is a massive shift. The point I would like to make is that even the futurists have great problems predicting the direction of that sudden shift. We must also consider that technological paradigm shifts almost invariably do not work out the way they are predicted to do before they occur.

For the last few decades many major technological advancements have been heralded as game changers. The advances are often generalised as sweeping statements about large-scale change. However, in most cases, new advances take a long time penetrating our daily lives, if they ever get that far.

So let me rephrase the original question a little. Perhaps the question is more about figuring out which technologies are diffused quicker than others, and why. This is something that we can calculate to some degree using a short history and the current status quo of assessments of technologies that are being touted as near-term game changers.

Dissemination of technology or knowledge always consists of at least three elements. I will for now ignore the process of diffusion for the sake of brevity. There is a supply side, a demand side and some kind of institutional or social construct that enables and even multiplies the diffusion.

The supply side is often most optimistic about how their ideas are going to change the game. The demand side is often naive about how useful a new technology is in real terms. Many potential users simply wait and see. Then there are the institutional mechanisms that operate at local, national, regional and international levels. There are lots of tensions at this institutional level, because this is where a whole range of social technologies, formal and informal, have to emerge or change. Just think of how US-based software companies are constantly coming up against data privacy groups in Europe. I am sometimes grateful that the institutional level takes time to change. Changing institutions to enable knowledge dissemination often requires multiple knowledge domains, different management levels and social play-offs. Often changing institutional support to improve diffusion must also cater for integrating and synchronising many other simultaneous change processes that are not only technological. They could be about regulations, rights and creating new forms of organisation. Furthermore, physical technology does not always change things the way we expect. After all, innovation is a process of combination and recombination, both at the level of physical technologies and also at the level of social technologies.

There are typically a few constraints that frustrate the diffusion of new technologies broadly speaking. The first is the fixed costs of the technology itself. Fixed costs slow down supply (otherwise we would already have electric vehicle charging points throughout the country), and also slow down demand (I cannot afford a Tesla yet).

Suppliers like to think that their solutions will fix social mechanisms, but this is often the area where change is the slowest. Social technologies often take the longest time to evolve (for instance in developing standards and regulations for electric vehicles, charging points and recycling of batteries). By evolving, the technology itself often changes with respect to its use, meaning and value  – often beyond what the originators had in mind. Thus while individual users can quickly adopt a new technology or idea, formal institutions, regulations and supporting infrastructure often take longer to adapt to new ideas. This means that the supporting ecosystem that enables new ideas to be quickly diffused perhaps adds additional costs (perhaps massive infrastructure investment or learning is needed), or fails to reduce costs in the diffusion of ideas. This is where the second constraint comes in. It depends on how complex are the required social changes. I mentioned earlier that institutional diffusion must also integrate different complementary technologies. For instance, using a smartphone to make phone calls is easy (single technological paradigm). Using a smartphone to manage or monitor a part of a production line requires many complementary and concurrent capabilities and technologies. It may even require completely rethinking organisational structures, production lines and supplier networks. Simply put, if the new idea is very complicated to use (due to the many concurrent investments and capabilities that are needed), then the costs goes up in terms of education, regulation, infrastructure, coordination, specialisation, management and so on. Just think of what it would take for South Africa to adopt driverless electric vehicles …

Perhaps this also explains why individual companies (think hierarchies) tend to absorb technologies easier than societies or economic sectors. Inside a company management can overcome coordination failures much easier than within a sector or broader society. Meso institutions such as universities and technology transfer organisations are very important for overcoming these coordination costs, but they tend to change slower.

The complexity of technology and its demands on the meso organisation is important in my work. I help these organisations figure out how to navigate the complexity of new technology adaptation and diffusion. It requires an understanding of users, some understanding of technologies, but a lot of understanding of the process of change and organisation. I don’t think I would be able to do my work without my understanding of market failures, especially with regard to failures in the capturing, dissemination, absorption or valuing of knowledge.

There are lots of amazing technological ideas out there that have been tried, tested and measured and found to be effective. Many companies here in South Africa are already using these technologies. So supply and demand exists, and in many cases there are transactions. Yet many of our industries, enterprises, universities and policy makers don’t know how these technologies can save costs, improve efficiency or strengthen resilience. Nor do they know which ideas will stick or have the most impact. So there is a missing institutional capability that reduces the complexity of the technology. What is often missing are institutions that make the dissemination of new ideas easier and cheaper. It is often more the case that the users (and possibly suppliers) don’t know how much the full implementation or use of these ideas would cost, or what skills, complementarities or networks are needed to master new ideas. Many market-supporting social technologies (in the form of institutions and networks) are lacking. Somebody must reduce the search, evaluation and coordination costs. This is where the complexity lies. And neither do we want our institutions to try and implement every new technology – this is where social balance and a longer-term vision are required.

So now I can get back to trends such as the Internet of Things or digitisation of the manufacturing environment. Many manufacturers know about Computer Aided Design (CAD) simulation or even rapid prototyping. But how can we reduce their risk of trying 3D printing, or how can they add more sensors to their production facilities so that they can improve measurement and control? It is not just about the cost of using the technology once or twice. There are issues that are holding entrepreneurs back from simply rushing to an online store and hitting “buy now”. Where would they get the trained staff from? How would they train existing staff? How would they manage a new competency? What would it cost to certify or maintain? Where would they find new customers or suppliers, and what would it cost them to develop the complementary capability and optimally use the new technology? And most importantly, how do we reduce their risks of trying something in different combinations? These are the issues that a network of institutions must consider as they craft their technology extension and demonstration strategies.

For me there is a strong role for technology intermediaries to play in demonstrating, perhaps on a small scale, how new technologies can be integrated into existing workplaces. This means that technology intermediaries must be funded to host (and master) a wide range of complementary technologies, so that entrepreneurs can combine what they have in place with the capabilities of these technology intermediaries. Or that new entrepreneurs not burdened by sunk investments can use their agility to gain access to complementary technologies in order to create new markets. These institutions should not be measured by how many companies fully absorb new technologies (this could lead to perverse incentives), but perhaps by how many companies have tried, engaged with and been exposed to new ideas.

At the same time, policy makers should look at ways to introduce new technologies into developing countries beyond demonstration or technology extension. Some countries such as Germany or Singapore have also been purposefully supporting disruptive incumbent enterprises by supporting the uptake of new technologies. Sometimes you can demonstrate until you are blue in the face, but incumbents won’t change if they don’t have to, and small enterprises sometimes simply cannot build up the momentum to challenge the status quo.

I would like to end this blog by briefly summarising what I’ve been discussing. For me the question of how new technologies may affect our lives is too focused on the hardware  and the geeks who love it. Even though I admire the suppliers and developers of new technologies, and I really admire the sophisticated users who are constantly inducing the emergence of newer and greater technologies, I believe that the real change we need is in getting better at creating responsive institutions that lower the costs for suppliers and buyers to try new things. This is where we can overcome many of the costs that slow down the absorption or dissemination of new technologies.

 

A resource for leaders trying to unlock knowledge

This is one of my favourite topics to write, read and talk about. How knowledge can be leveraged to enable innovation in organisations. Even if it is tacit, or people don’t even know they posses valuable knowledge, leaders can create an environment where these ideas can be surfaced, explored and leveraged.

The pdf here contains three revised blog posts that I wrote on my ‘thinking out loud‘ blog site over the last two years. I’ve had the text edited and have made some improvements. Take a look and let me know if you find this useful.

Unlocking knowledge in organisations to unlock innovation

In 2016 I wrote an article for the University of Stellenbosch Business Schools Thought Thursdays newsletter about how leaders can unlock knowledge intheir organisations to enable innovation. This article has lead to many
interesting presentations, speeches and conversations. I also wrote several follow on articles on the cunningham.org.za that can all be accessed from this link.

In the USB article I wrote that leaders must incentivise and encourage staff to accumulate knowledge through deduction and experimentation, as well as reaching beyond their organisation. This would require that staff are encouraged to invest time in reading, exploring and trying out new ideas.  Learning by doing should be encouraged, and tacit knowledge should be actively sought out and leveraged.

For the readers of this blog I think that article is a good starting point to reflect on the culture of acknowledging and encouraging knowledge creation in your organisation. It is not so important to try and formalise all knowledge as it is to actively encourage employees to actively seek out what they know and to experiment with how this knowledge can be used, recombined and leveraged.

Post 3 of 3:What can leaders do to embrace tacit knowledge more

My original name of this post was “What can leaders do to embrace tacit knowledge more to enable innovative organisational cultures?”, but this is too long!

This is the third post in the series. It is about some of the “how” questions that leaders should consider if they want to create more innovative organisational cultures. This is not an exhaustive list, but it covers some of the ideas tried by some of the leaders and organisations I work with.

How can leaders embrace the tacit knowledge in their teams?

Firstly, leaders must recognise the value of dissenters, namely those people who are expressing their opinions based on their different experiences and perspectives. Space must be created for those who think differently to make their contributions. In a learning organisation, different perspectives and views are valued above title and qualifications. Furthermore, people must be encouraged to express their enthusiasm or concerns without the need for “facts”. Intuitive remarks should be treated as hypotheses and leaders should encourage people to investigate these hunches so that plans and activities can be adapted to address them.

Secondly, leaders must create space for people to learn. This learning must not be limited to the core functions that people are responsible for. A learning mind set requires constant and wide-ranging learning, not only at the level of individuals but also at the level of teams. Furthermore, employees should be encouraged to read, explore and discover during work time. This means that managers must also create space for people to think individually and collectively. One way to encourage stronger social networks in organisations is to encourage people from different work areas to cooperate on solving a problem or developing an idea.

In my opinion, leaders must also ensure that their workers are balanced in how they work. For instance, workers who take loads of work home will not be able to be creative, playful or serendipitous during work time. This means that leaders must also lead by example, and not send long e-mails filled with detailed instructions after hours.

Thirdly, leaders must promote this learning culture by allowing for serendipity. This means that leaders can lead by example and allow workers to explore by themselves how things can be improved, changed or tweaked. Simple ways in which this can be encouraged are to provide teams with a small budget to try things, model things, explore ideas, jointly participate in online courses or invite a speaker to address staff. This kind of exploration cannot always be planned, but it must be encouraged within certain boundaries. Leaders must encourage teams to stretch their thinking or challenge their beliefs. This increases the stock of creative and imaginative ideas that people can generate in their daily work. While some exploration can be related to official plans, much exploration is about forming new social ties, self-expression, curiosity and even personal fulfilment.

Fourthly, great leaders can sense tacit knowledge in their people, but only if they are close enough to them. Teams and co-workers can figure out when somebody uses tacit knowledge to solve a problem or propose an idea, and can draw in people with different perspectives. Great team leaders know that tacit knowledge is an asset when people are encouraged to disagree or think out loud, when the voices of dissenters are taken seriously, and when diversity is openly embraced. Sensible leaders know when to trust their people and when to use explicit knowledge to shape the behaviour of their people.

Fifthly, the stories that people tell are important. Instead of trying to suppress gossip, leaders should listen and reflect on their own values and how these are perceived by their teams. Office gossip is a powerful form of tacit knowledge transfer, and it is not all negative. When people are talking about somebody’s misfortune, hurt or distress, leaders can step in with empathy and encourage teams to support people who are experiencing problems in their lives. This might even be an opportune moment to reflect on how organisations function within a broader societal context. Workers are extremely sensitive to the gap between what managers say they value and how they behave. When people talk about office relations, or breaches in values by any rank, leaders should step in and make sure that rules and regulations are adhered to, regardless of the seniority of the people involved. These are the moments where real organisational values are refined.

When co-workers start to influence each other negatively, leaders should step in and separate people or re-arrange them to break up negative cells. All of this is only possible when leaders listen to what their people are talking about, and then being trustworthy and responsible in dealing with what they hear.

Lastly, leaders should take care not to over-formalise. Formal rules often communicate mistrust and reduce the ability of people to exercise judgement. When everything is fixed in a rule, regulation or process, organisations’ ability to respond to sudden change is reduced.

Perhaps leaders can ask their teams “Is there something we must do less of to be more innovative?”. This question often targets excessive rules, policies and guidelines. I always encourage the leaders I work with to openly state when they have to make a decision for which a precedent or rule does not exist. We then encourage their teams to generate well-thought-out portfolios of options, or a portfolio of small experiments that can be tried. These portfolios must leverage the formal and informal capabilities of the organisation and individuals. This is one way that tacit knowledge becomes more explicit. One benefit is that by building the adaptive capability of their teams by not always taking the lead, their workers are encouraged to come up with ideas, solutions or options. When people understand that they have a role to play in formulating options, they are also better able to reflect on why some things works and others do not. This makes the organisation more agile, as people learn to work together to solve novel problems, and they become better at detecting when things are not going according to plan. Because they are co-designers, they are also better able to generate and evaluate alternatives, which means that the organisation has a greater stock of options that it can combine and execute. If too much formality is enforced this ability will not emerge.

In my view many leadership teams are too focused on explicit knowledge, and that tacit knowledge deserves more attention. For organisations to innovate now and in the future, the development of tacit knowledge formation must be encouraged and embraced. This means that opportunities must be created for people to self-organise around ideas, projects and topics. This builds trust, even if it does not always add directly to the bottom line. It also makes it easier for the finance people to team up with the technical people, and for people to get better at drawing on the experiences and perspectives of others.