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Your Experts
for Knowledge Management, Innovation Management, and Social Network
Analysis
Informal
communication of knowledge is a critical factor for the success and
failure of organizations. The importance of knowledge in
organizational
environments is widely subject to research, strategies, solutions
and discussions. After the hype about knowledge management (KM), the
discussions have slowed
down during the last years. Not only did the question arise, whether
knowledge
can be actually managed, but doubt has been cast on simplistic
approaches, technical solutions and the contribution of knowledge
management to the return on
investment. This slow down provides the opportunity to take a closer
look at the
role and processes of knowledge in organizations, to undertake a more
detailed
analysis, and to offer more complex and (hopefully) more suitable
approaches to
deal with them.
We put
our focus on the processes of knowledge
generation through knowledge communication within and between
organizations. The pragmatic approach of networks is outlined as a
powerful concept to
grasp the social relationships between individuals as well as between
social aggregates for conceptual and analytical purposes.
Social
network analysis (SNA) has become more widely recognized as
a potential method to analyze, evaluate and influence knowledge
generation processes. We provide guidelines to undertake an evaluation
of the informal
communication structures within a specific domain of knowledge through
application of tools and methods of social network analysis.
Our
action model goes beyond the
boundaries of a passive descriptive-analytical academic method toward
an intervening active framework to shape the relationships of knowledge
communication
in organizations.
More
about our perspectives on:
Knowledge
Society and Knowledge Management
Knowledge
Communities and Knowledge Networks
Innovation
Networks in Research and Development (R&D)
Social
Network Analysis as a Knowledge Management Tool
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