Knowlege Management: How do we manage something that we can't necessarily see or touch?

Have you ever had to manage knowledge? manage ideas? how about creativity? Is it possible to build a "physical" structure that will manage these untouchables? Let's discuss.

i'm not sure if i understood it correctly but do you mean managing knowledge in terms of sharing information/knowledge with other people? if so, i would say that one possibility would be to write everything down and make this information available for everybody - but still, people would have to know where the information is published and how to use it (i guess this is one of the biggest problems because you have no control over what people do with the information)...

from my own work experience so far, knowledge management doesn't always work that well especially when the all-knowing person is on holiday for 3 weeks

I think it is possible to manage knowledge in a certain way and encourage creativity in every enterprise. But I am convinced that it needs a lot of practice and management experience. And I think that this process is especially linked with coordinated work (teamspirit) and not just pushing through ideas of individual or dominant persons. One way of creating knowledge in an enterprise would be considering company-wide innovations or external sources.

Have a nice weekend:)

Just wanted to clarify, yes - you were correct in how you interpreted the question and the answer you gave.

cornelia wrote:i'm not sure if i understood it correctly but do you mean managing knowledge in terms of sharing information/knowledge with other people? if so, i would say that one possibility would be to write everything down and make this information available for everybody - but still, people would have to know where the information is published and how to use it (i guess this is one of the biggest problems because you have no control over what people do with the information)...

from my own work experience so far, knowledge management doesn't always work that well especially when the all-knowing person is on holiday for 3 weeks

Hi to everyone,

I have had the expierence in my company that knowledge management worked very well. There were jour fixes normally twice a week with staff of different hierarchies. It seemed to me that they were excellent teamplayers and nobody was afraid of sharing knowledge and ideas. I think it had also to do with the rewarding system and of course they had target agreements which were set at the beginning of each period.

Furthermore they had another interesting method, which they called "Joker Lunch". At JL 4 to 7 people from different departments of the company arrange to meet for lunch. Most times people see eachother for the first time. I think this is an excellent intern networking method.