Kathy Harris

I wrote some research linking knowledge management and innovation way back in 1998 — before the turn of the century (I always wanted to say that).  During the last ten years, I’ve had many discussions about why having great access to information and content does not constitute great knowledge management. My position (and I’m sticking to it) is that KM is more about the knowledge in people’s heads than information that we capture and structure and access.

I heard a conversation last week where the term “connective intelligence” was used. A lot of people have suggested to me that KM is about collective intelligence or corporate memory or knowledge bases, but while these terms suggest these people know that KM involves richer forms of information management, it still rings of information that sort of lies there and doesn’t do much. So, a term like connective intelligence really describes (for me, at least) what we should expect of KM and all that digitized information we store in hopes of managing knowledge.

And, what does this mean to innovation? First, we really should focus on reusing information. We should lift good ideas directly from one domain and apply them in others – this is good and valuable use of information. However, reuse is not a game-changer if we’re after innovation. The real KM and innovation payoff is realized when we search out the nuggets or insights or wild ideas of others and connect them with our own wild or insightful nuggets. Or, we gain some insight and we stash it away and retrieve it when we need it. These acts of connecting ideas and knowledge are where we really can convert information into innovations.