High-yield business innovation is created by bringing together knowledgeable individuals with disparate backgrounds and focusing them on the key issues surrounding a product or service, a market, a business process, an organizational structure, a set of alliances and relationships, or any other topic whose resolution would have a material affect on the business. By allowing new eyes to examine the issues, new connections are generated that result in imaginative ideas and novel solutions.
Most of the factors that contribute to innovation success are organizational. These factors include vision, leadership, tenacity, a willingness to fail, and to use what is learned from failure.
Innovation success also depends on having the right support infrastructure—an infrastructure that is geared for real-time collaboration and connection, and which allows people to assemble in virtual teams and then dissolve once the work is completed. The knowledge required for innovation and the infrastructure to support it both fall within the domain of knowledge management.
Building a Culture of Innovation
In the widely read Harvard Business Review article “Why IT Doesn’t Matter”, author Nicholas Carr drew a line in the sand—information technology would no longer provide the platform for innovation and competitive advantage, as it had done for the past two decades. IT has become a commodity and most enterprises are on a relatively equal footing.
In areas like transaction processing and telecommunications, IT is indeed a commodity. However, in knowledge management, we don’t agree. IT investments in knowledge management can make all the difference in the world!
We believe that innovation rests on breaking down the stovepipes between organizational units and implementing a collaborative and knowledge sharing infrastructure to connect everyone—from suppliers to customers—into a single, seamless community. Developing this innovation platform leverages new tools and methodologies, such as knowledge mapping and social network analysis, to make explicit the often unexplored, underlying connections between people and ideas.
Making these connections and ideas explicit, and having the ability to connect them with the resources that can translate the ideas into new product and service offerings and into new process improvements, is key. “Starting with a blank canvas” is mostly myth—very few innovations develop as a result of returning to first principles. Virtually all innovations emerge when a group of experienced individuals challenge conventional wisdom.
Over time, with the right knowledge and the right processes and infrastructure in place, high yield innovation becomes embedded into the organization’s culture and the growing repository of knowledge assets becomes a true source of sustainable competitive advantage.
Value Delivered
Clear quantifiable benefits can be significant and appear at all organizational levels and functions. Innovation increases the efficiency and effectiveness of teams and business processes through enhanced information access, sharing, and collaboration, and improves the quality and speed of complex decision making. Some of these benefits include increased revenues, shorter business process cycle times, and greater employee productivity, and less-quantifiable but equally valuable benefits, such as more rewarding work and higher levels of employee creativity. It’s not uncommon to see improvements along several performance dimensions simultaneously. For example, a recent consulting assignment we performed for a call center yielded improved customer satisfaction, increased first call resolution, reduced call handling times, lower call center costs, and decreased turnover of the customer service representatives.
Iknow’s Services
Iknow has guided numerous clients through all of the organizational and operational challenges involved with establishing a knowledge-enabled innovation culture. Iknow has experience across every phase of developing sophisticated, knowledge-driven product development and process improvement solutions, which typically involve a combination of management consulting services and advanced software technologies. We provide the following services:
- Knowledge-Enabled Business Process Redesign. We design/redesign core business processes to take advantage of better information and new software tools and technologies. Typically, we work with processes that have a significant knowledge component, where the introduction of new technologies and tools can create quantum jumps in performance.
- Business Decision Making. We identify and implement advanced decision-making approaches and methodologies.
- Organizational Change Management. We address the change management issues involved with transforming the workforce to become highly proficient in a knowledge-enabled environment. Iknow’s management consulting experience ensures that the people-related issues are always considered and addressed. This is the major challenge with respect to achieving the benefits from investments in knowledge management.
- Knowledge Mapping and Social Network Analysis. One of the important elements that characterize sustainable innovation is the ability of people to reach out to the right resources at the right time—making a new set of connections based on the organization’s underlying resource base. Iknow identifies and applies leading methodologies and best practices to enable sustainable innovation.
- Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). PLM is becoming an increasingly important component of the innovation process, as these systems provide the foundational data model on which new products and processes are built. Developing the interfaces between innovation processes and PLM represent a transformation in the level of collaboration and knowledge sharing at every stage of the development process.
- Advanced Software Tools. We help companies select and implement knowledge management software products that enhance individual and team productivity and improve the quality and speed of complex decision making. Some of these tools include content management, document management, enterprise search, business process management/workflow automation, collaboration, data mining, text mining and text analysis, and visualization. We perform needs identification; requirements definition; software product identification, evaluation, and selection; and software implementation activities.
Our knowledge innovation consulting services dovetail with our services in Knowledge Stewardship and Knowledge Monetization.
Iknow Project Summaries – Knowledge-Based Innovation
Several recent knowledge-based innovation assignments are described below to give you an idea of the type and breadth of work we can undertake. A complete project summary can be downloaded by clicking on the document's title or on the image to the left.
Instilling a Knowledge Sharing Culture
Building a foundation for knowledge sharing in research and development
One of Europe’s largest research-oriented pharmaceutical and diagnostic product companies wanted to embed a knowledge sharing culture into its worldwide R&D organization. The company’s executives desired a culture that would more readily collaborate, share knowledge, and recognize and reward knowledge sharing behaviors. Iknow was asked to help with the overall design and planning.
Building a High Performance Workforce
Increasing employee productivity at a global airline
A global airline wanted to develop and deploy a “virtual office” environment that would improve the productivity and communications of its worldwide operations. Iknow was selected to lead this initiative.
Launching a data management and knowledge management initiative
Iknow conducted a comprehensive current state assessment and developed a strategic roadmap for improving data management and knowledge management capabilities for the Marketing Organization of a top pharmaceutical company. The assessment and plan was completed within 60 days.
Improving Customer Service at Call Centers
Implementing enterprise content management (ECM) at a major telecommunications company
A global telecommunications company wanted to improve overall customer service and increase CSR productivity at its North American call center operations. Iknow was asked to help design a new, comprehensive call center solution.
Please see our Project Portfolio for more examples of recent client assignments.
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Contact us today and let Iknow create knowledge-based competitive advantage for you!
