Articles
Singapore’s Innovation Journey
Innovation, like SPRING, is in the air. Creativity is all the rage. Entrepreneurship is on every agenda. But what does it all mean for how we run our organizations, and how do all these different ideas connect to each other? We don’t actually want too many people running around with too many crazy ideas, nor do we want unfocussed fragmentations of our core businesses by over-enthusiastic entrepreneurs. In this article we’ll look at the core capabilities that generate innovation. The experience of Singapore itself in its radical transformation and remarkable success over the past four decades, and research conducted by Straits Knowledge into perceptions of innovation among Singapore managers will serve to guide us along the way.
Posted by edgar on 01/04/02 at 06:30 PM | Categories: Innovation | Permalink
Ignorance Management: The Lessons of Small Enterprises for Knowledge Management
Knowledge management as traditionally espoused has two main strands: dealing with the aggregation of knowledge and the transfer of knowledge. However this official discourse and its key concepts grew out of the experience of large, mature, highly structured and dispersed enterprises. Looking at the environment in which small enterprises work suggests a different set of key concepts, looking at the notions of experience and structural capital as key knowledge manipulation tools. These tools are particularly relevant to environments of high uncertainty, volatility and risk – and so also have a significant contribution to make to the direction of knowledge management for larger enterprises, where adaptiveness and ignorance management tools are becoming increasingly important.
Posted by edgar on 01/04/02 at 05:40 PM | Categories: KM Critiqued | Permalink
Singapore’s Innovation Agenda
Innovation is in the air for this new year of the Horse, recently given a pragmatic, entrepreneurial twist by Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew. The Productivity and Standards Board has been given the charter to promote innovation in Singapore, and on April 1 st will change its name to SPRING Singapore (Standards, Productivity and Innovation for Growth). The much anticipated National Innovation Council, announced by Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong in November last year, is expected to be formed in the next few months.
Posted by edgar on 19/02/02 at 06:32 PM | Categories: Innovation | Permalink
Connectedness
Every day, an Ethiopian entrepreneur goes to the only cybercafe in the capital, at the Meridien Hotel, Addis Ababa. There he logs into a website he has set up in America, and he checks the orders he has received from Ethiopian cab drivers in New York, for goats to be sent to their families back home.
Posted by edgar on 10/01/02 at 05:50 PM | Categories: KM Critiqued | Permalink
Failing to Learn
At a knowledge management workshop recently, I passed around a small plastic box to the participants. “Here,” I said, “put some knowledge in here.” Some participants just stared. One or two wrote something down on a piece of paper and put it in. But of course, the aim was not to collect pieces of paper, but to try to characterise the dilemma that is knowledge management. We moved on into a discussion of what KM is, and how the KM industry represents itself. Is it really about aggregating pieces of what people know – on piece of paper or in digital format? Others felt it was about promoting a culture of knowledge-sharing. If technology was involved, it was about giving people access to each other, and making it easy to collaborate.
Posted by edgar on 17/07/01 at 02:43 PM | Categories: KM Critiqued | Permalink
Wittgenstein’s Ladder: The Coming Irrelevance of Knowledge Managers
In 1920, the brilliant Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein abandoned philosophy after having written what he felt was the ultimate analysis of how language and meaning work (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922). He first became a primary school teacher, but quarrelled with his colleagues and some of the parents, and turned to gardening. It was nine years before he just as suddenly decided to return to philosophy, taking up a fellowship at Cambridge University, declaring that he had got it wrong the first time round. He spent the next twenty-two years quarrelling with students and colleagues and working on his next work, Philosophical Investigations (1953).
This article appeared as a chapter in Rethinking Knowledge edited by Kim Sbarcea (Lexis-Nexis Australia, 2002)
Posted by edgar on 01/07/01 at 02:30 PM | Categories: KM Competencies | Permalink
Building the People Infrastructure for Your E-Busines
In late 2000, Forrester Research predicted that Net commerce, both B2B and B2C, would expand at “hypergrowth” in Asia Pacific over the next three years. From US$64 billion in 2000, it would reach US$1.7 trillion by 2004 – a rate of 130% to 150% each year. These are extravagant numbers – especially when you consider that this is in a region where 50-80% of the workforce is employed by small and medium enterprises, where technology infrastructure is patchy and
inconsistent, and where IT literacy rates are still cause for concern among ageing workforce populations.
Posted by edgar on 21/03/01 at 02:22 PM | Categories: KM Applied | Permalink
From Rhetoric to Reality: KM and Success in the SME World
When you look at success in business, you get a compelling sense of the true momentum behind the old economy. Almost half of the 500 most successful SMEs in Singapore are in the construction and manufacturing related industries, and when you look at this year’s top fifty companies, that figure rises to 60%. The highly touted new economy sectors of logistics and financial and business services barely register in the top fifty companies, and make up only a quarter of the
top five hundred.
Posted by edgar on 23/11/00 at 02:18 PM | Categories: KM Critiqued | Permalink
The Blind Tour Guide: Leadership in the New Economy
Imagine, if you will, that you are arriving for the first time in Singapore on a special holiday package, with your own individual tour guide as part of the package. You arrive at the airport, and there, as promised, is your tour guide. He is tall, about 50 years old, and very distinguished looking, but he is almost completely blind. He first started going blind in 1968, the year he graduated from tour guiding school, the year of flower power in California and student revolts in Paris, before man ever got to the Moon. Before you gird up your loins for an assault on your tour operator for short-changing you, imagine two more small things. First, you live in a world where all tour guides start going blind as soon as they graduate, and second, you live in a world that accords great respect and deference to tour guides. You never ever question a tour guide’s ability to show you around.
Posted by edgar on 15/08/00 at 02:10 PM | Categories: Leadership | Permalink
Sick Companies
In Part one of this series I argued that there was a deeper digital divide between old economy and new economy workers than simply the ability to manipulate technology. In Part two I laid part of the blame for our discontinuities on the failure of leaders to adopt new models of leadership more appropriate to the transitions we must undergo. In this article I want to focus on that other, more difficult area of resistance to change: the interplay between leadership and corporate culture.
Posted by edgar on 08/08/00 at 02:06 PM | Categories: Culture, Leadership | Permalink