Six legal ways for an organisation to acquire knowledge

There are 6 ways in which an organisation can acquire new knowledge

 Davenport and Prusak (that classic of the genre, first published in 1998). give six ways of knowledge creation within a company (and by creation, they don’t necessarily mean “creation from nothing” – they mean acquiring that knowledge in-house).

There are other methods of knowledge acquisition which they don’t mention, such as IP theft, industrial espionage, patent infringement, reverse engineering, pirating and so on, but of course these are illegal.

These six legal ways are as follows;

Purchasing the knowledge. The most effective way to get knowledge is to buy it. A company can buy knowledge from another company, by using them as an outsource partner or a supplier, or by buying training, or they can hire individuals that have the knowledge. Or they can find a company they has the knowledge they need, and buy the company. Many corporate acquisitions are about acquisition of knowledge.

Renting the knowledge. This may be one of the most common ways of acquiring the knowledge – you bring in a consultant. Effectively you hire them to bring the knowledge in, and apply it in your context. Then once the problem is fixed, you don’t need them any more. You hire knowledge at home every time you bring in a tradesman to service your boiler, for example.

Dedicated resources to create knowledge. Here the company dedicates resources to knowledge creation. This could be an R&D department, or a thinktank, or the 20% of time that Google staff are reputed to have, to spend on innovative projects.

Fusion of existing knowledge into something new. Here you bring people from different parts of the company to work together on a project, or to collaborate  on a problem. This is the process that happens in Peer Assists and Knowledge Exchange and often results in the creation of new knowledge from old.

Adaptation is a company response to changes in the environment, or to problems and disasters. The bigger the change, or the bigger the disaster, the greater the adaptation that is needed. This form of adaptation is the knowledge-creating process you see within Lessons Learned systems.

Networking is the final method for knowledge creation, which to me is really a type of fusion. This is the mechanism of Knowledge Creation within Communities of Practice.