Nick Milton from Knoco stories poses an interesting question: How are KM and Innovation related? Are they opposites, or the same? Or maybe two sides of the same coin? In the blog posting, he lists some thoughts and potential answers.
It's an interesting question and an important one as well, since innovation is so important for many organizations and innovation gets a lot of attention. Here is my thought, based on the assumption that innovation starts with ideas.
KM (in general) can help organizations in three moments in time:
1. the past: preserving knowledge, learning from what is done so whatever went wrong is not done again and what went well is remembered.
2. the present: using knowledge to get work done. Sharing, collaboration, finding people, retrieving knowledge, etc.
3. the future: learning something new for future use, identifying gaps in knowledge for the direction the organization is heading and bringing people together to generate ideas for new products and services.
In the past I thought too that KM could help make people's work more efficient so they have time for creativity, but I don't believe any longer that making time free (automatically) leads to new thoughts, ideas and so on. Often something (more) needs to be done to and I think that KM can provide the tools to bring people together, like a community or a World Cafe type of setting.
I have good experience with a World Cafe set up, which we called "Innovation Cafe". We brought people from the same department (voluntary, open registration) together, most of whom hardly knew each other because they were in different teams on different locations. We had organized the conversations around four themes (People, Process, Tools, Product/other) and participants would rotate. It generated a lot of ideas, often based on issues that people had in the work environment. The question in that arose in the post-discussion was if this is innovation or continuous improvement?
Going back to Nick's posting, I think my thought is most closely to the second item in the list:
Innovation takes over from knowledge management when there is no knowledge to fit your business need, and you need new ideas. New ideas can often spring from old knowledge combined in new ways - the Remix approach to innovation.
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