Critical role of leadership in nurturing a knowledge-supporting culture

This paper addresses the critical role leadership plays in the implementation and facilitation of knowledge management activities. Leadership is particularly important for organizations willing to ‘evolve’ their culture to a knowledge-supporting culture. Organizational culture has been identified as the main impediment to knowledge activities, and therefore leaders should model the proper behaviors causing culture to evolve in a way that enables and motivates knowledge workers to create, codify, transfer, and use and leverage knowledge. In the literature this leadership behavior is referred to as ‘leading through a knowledge lens’. Leading through a knowledge lens has some special characteristics since it is dealing with knowledge workers having specialized expertise. Leading them can be done only by intellectual power, conviction, persuasion, and interactive dialog. It requires skills that build confidence and engagement. Therefore, leaders should establish trust and commitment that will help the knowledge organization to achieve its knowledge and business goals.     

An interpretative model from the elasticity theory to explore knowledge integration in new product development

This paper presents a conceptual model to explore the knowledge integration (KI) practices of internal and external company actors involved in the New Product Development (NPD) process of the aerospace industry. The model is based on the linkage of elasticity principles, particularly Hooke’s Law, to Knowledge Management theory. KI practices are considered as a force pushing the NPD process and are metaphorically described as the spring addressed by Hooke’s law. The integration of the knowledge of internal and external company actors impacts NPD, reducing the dimensions of the whole process, in terms of phases, through the application of the concurrent engineering approach. The whole NPD process is improved in terms of the reduction of uncertainty and complexity, and with an ‘integrated energy’ that sustains the pressure of the fast-changing competitive environment. The model is explored to provide an interpretation of the conceptualisation phase of a new aerospace product development process. Qualitative data were collected and analysed. Insights regarding the applications of the model and the theoretical implications are also provided for applications in other industries.     

Precariousness under the new psychological contract: the effect on trust and the willingness to converse and share knowledge

This paper argues that the traditional employment relationship based on long-term commitment and reciprocity has been replaced by one which incorporates a high level of precariousness and that individuals form perceptions of the trust they have in the organisation based on their view of the psychological contract. This paper develops a model of these perceptions and develops six propositions about an individual's level of trust in the organisation, management and fellow workers and their belief that their expectations will be progressively met and that they will be compensated in the long term for their contribution. These perceptions and the six propositions developed in the paper have profound ramifications for the willingness of individuals to converse and potentially to share their knowledge with others for the benefit of the organisation, because high levels of trust will be needed before individuals will be predisposed to start to converse and exhibit a willingness to share their knowledge.     

Incremental cue phrase learning and bootstrapping method for causality extraction using cue phrase and word pair probabilities

This work aims to extract possible causal relations that exist between noun phrases. Some causal relations are manifested by lexical patterns like causal verbs and their sub-categorization. We use lexical patterns as a filter to find causality candidates and we transfer the causality extraction problem to the binary classification. To solve the problem, we introduce probabilities for word pair and concept pair that could be part of causal noun phrase pairs. We also use the cue phrase probability that could be a causality pattern. These probabilities are learned from the raw corpus in an unsupervised manner. With this probabilistic model, we increase both precision and recall. Our causality extraction shows an F-score of 77.37%, which is an improvement of 21.14 percentage points over the baseline model. The long distance causal relation is extracted with the binary tree-styled cue phrase. We propose an incremental cue phrase learning method based on the cue phrase confidence score that was measured after each causal classifier learning step. A better recall of 15.37 percentage points is acquired after the cue phrase learning.     

Knowledge management and intellectual capital: an empirical examination of current practice in Australia

This paper reports the findings from a survey conducted in Australia to explore current practices relating to knowledge management (KM) and intellectual capital (IC). A systematic approach in the form of the intellectual capital web guided the research. Findings revealed that KM was perceived to be more about developing knowledge culture than about managing organisational processes and structure. IC was perceived to be more about human capital than about customer capital and organisational capital. It can therefore be concluded that human capital holds the greatest importance for KM and IC. However, when facilitators for knowledge creation and knowledge sharing were rated, organisation structure was perceived to be more important than organisational culture and information technology. For KM practices, participants indicated that more attention was paid to training and developing employees and less to measurement and reward and incentive issues. The importance of aligning the management of IC and KM was perceived to be more important than the difficulty of doing so.     

Personal knowledge management: supporting individual knowledge worker performance

Based on an exploratory study of the work and learning processes of highly skilled and experienced knowledge workers, this paper explores an alternative perspective to knowledge management, one that focuses on how individual workers apply knowledge processes to support their day-to-day work activities – broadly characterized as problem solving – and learning practices. Developing the concept of Personal Knowledge Management, the paper presents an emergent model that links distinctive types of problem solving activities with specific cognitive, information, social and learning competencies, supported by an individual, social and organizational enablers.     

Looking to the Internet for models of governance

If code is law then standards bodies are governments. This flawed but powerful metaphor suggests the need to examine more closely those standards bodies that are defining standards for the Internet. In this paper we examine the International Telecommunications Union, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the World Wide Web Consortium. We compare the organizations on the basis of participation, transparency, authority, openness, security and interoperability. We conclude that the IETF and the W3C are becoming increasingly similar. We also conclude that the classical distinction between standards and implementations is decreasingly useful as standards are embodies in code – itself a form of speech or documentation. Recent Internet standards bodies have flourished in part by discarding or modifying the implementation/standards distinction. We illustrate that no single model is superior on all dimensions. The IETF is not effectively scaling, struggling with its explosive growth with the creation of thousands of working groups. The IETF coordinating body, the Internet Society, addressed growth by reorganization that removed democratic oversight. The W3C, initially the most closed, is becoming responsive to criticism and now includes open code participants. The IEEE SA and ITU have institutional controls appropriate for hardware but too constraining for code. Each organization has much to learn from the others.     

Knowledge characteristics of communities of practice

This paper proposes a typology of communities of practice based on their knowledge characteristics. The structure of a community of practice, in terms of knowledge, may tend to the stratified or to the egalitarian. The predominant knowledge activity of the community may be sharing or nurturing. This produces four classes of community of practice. The paper identifies and discusses examples of these classes. It is argued that the class to which a community belongs tends to determine the rapidity with which knowledge within the community evolves and the degree of pluralism, as opposed to homogeneity, that the knowledge exhibits. The paper concludes by discussing some of the implications of the typology for knowledge management practice.     

Managing supply chain knowledge-based linkages for improving operational performance

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the role of internal and external knowledge-based linkages across the supply chain in achieving better operational performance. It investigates how knowledge is accumulated, shared, and applied to create organization-specific knowledge resources that increase and sustain the organization’s competitive advantage. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses a single case study with multiple, embedded units of analysis, and the social network analysis (SNA) to demonstrate the impact of internal and external knowledge-based linkages across multiple tiers in the supply chain on the organizational operational performance. The focal company of the case study is an Italian manufacturer supplying rubber components to European automotive enterprises. Findings – With the aid of the SNA, the internal knowledge-based linkages can be mapped and visualized. We found that the most central nodes having the most connections with other nodes in the linkages are the most crucial members in terms of knowledge exploration and exploitation within the organization. We also revealed that the effective management of external knowledge-based linkages, such as buyer company, competitors, university, suppliers, and subcontractors, can help improve the operational performance. Research limitations/implications – First, our hypothesis was tested on a single case. The analysis of multiple case studies using SNA would provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between the knowledge-based linkages at all levels of the supply chain and the integration of knowledge. Second, the static nature of knowledge flows was studied in this research. Future research could also consider ongoing monitoring of dynamic linkages and the dynamic characteristic of knowledge flows. Originality/value – To the best of our knowledge, the phrase ‘knowledge-based linkages’ has not been used in the literature and there is lack of investigation on the relationship between the management of internal and external knowledge-based linkages and the operational performance. To bridge the knowledge gap, this paper will show the importance of understanding the composition and characteristics of knowledge-based linkages and their knowledge nodes. In addition, this paper will show that effective management of knowledge-based linkages leads to the creation of new knowledge and improves organizations’ operational performance.     

Heuristic maximization of the number of spanning trees in regular graphs

This paper deals with the problem of finding graphs (directed and undirected) maximizing the number of spanning trees among the regular graphs with the same number of nodes and edges. The approach is based on heuristic algorithms such as k-optimal and evolutionary. The emphasis is rather on checking whether these techniques are applicable to solving extremal graph problems than investigating generic structures of optimal graphs. For this reason circulant graphs, for which computationally effective tree counting formulas exist, are discussed first and then the results extended to cover the class of regular graphs.