Customer Reviews

The New Knowledge Management: Complexity, Learning, and Sustainable Innovation (KMCI Press)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As the reviewer from mexico notes, most of the chapters of this book are reprints of previously published articles. This make the presentation disappointingly repetitive.

The author makes a great contribution creating the awareness that KM is much more that IT, and that it is about creating new knowledge and organizational learning. Although the idea is not new, he presents it through an interesting framework called the Knowledge Life Cycle. Thats great.

On the other hand, since the book is a compilation of previous papers from the author, I feel that he repeats the same ideas over and over again. I couldn't find explicit evidence of the aplication of these ideas on the day to day work. I also see a contradiction in the sense that he says that the new KM is more about creating new knowledge, but it seems to me that he is trying to create new knowledge through the re-frasing and re-naming of other author's ideas. Please...don't throw more "fancy words" to the KM arena, it is already full !

In this wonderful little book, Mark McElroy begins to do for Knowledge Management what Peter Senge did for Organizational Learning: He connects deep theory with cogent practice, bringing the entire discipline to a new level. The book is a carefully designed compendium of Mark's leading-edge thinking over the past several years. In it he lays out the foundations for the next generation - "demand-side" - Knowledge Management, which enhances individuals capacity to produce knowledge, rather than simply use what's already there. By integrating a unique approach to complexity science with insights from organizational learning, he develops a model of "sustainable innovation" which is based on a broader theoretical framework of Social Innovation Capital (SIC). His SIC framework generates a core insight - the Policy Synchronization Method - a theory-based yet practical method for creating the conditions that support innovation in the long term. His writing is as useful as his modeling, for he constantly grounds his thinking into concrete and highly applicable suggestions that can be utilized in a wide range of contexts. Near the end of the book he shows the economic returns on investment from his second-generation KM, and concludes with a "presentation" that can be used to help make the case for these ideas in formal and informal settings. As a professor of entrepreneurship and management at a business school, and a 20-year student of complexity science, I am a true fan of Mark McElroy, and I am excited by this book and the ones soon to follow.

The book "The New Knowledge Management" addresses some very intriguing concepts and provides some innovative thinking in the knowledge management area. It shows how the fundamental concepts of organization learning, innovation, social innovation capital, and complex adaptive systems are related to knowledge management. The author introduces the reader to the idea of "second -generation knowledge management" which is used as a framework to relate the above concepts to knowledge management. "Second-generation knowledge management is more inclusive of people, process, and social initiatives than "first-generation knowledge management". The book provides some unique insights and organizations approaches to sustain innovation. These insights are the first of its kind and have far reaching implications to how we should manage organizations. The book is very thought provoking and a must read for people interested in theory and practical implications. I am currently using it as one of my text in teaching a graduate course in knowledge management.

This guy has some good ideas about evolving a company's KW technology. Useful as a textbook.