Knowledge Management and Societal Innovation - Lectures

Knowledge management lectures
Introduction

Creativity is based on individual knowledge.
What is the definition of creativity? Ability to come up with a novel element.
Van Gogh came up with something creative, but it was built up of something from other
painters. You build up from something you know.

Collaborative knowledge is required for innovation.
The idea of collaboration is important, because it eases the process of coming up with
something new.

There is implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge:
 Explicit knowledge is something you can explicitly report. Our system is mostly based
on explicit knowledge. Innovation/innovator is explicit knowledge. It’s knowledge
that’s somewhere in your plan.
 Implicit knowledge is more difficult to share. Implicit knowledge is the register within
your mind.

Difference between creativity and innovation: Van Gogh was creative, but not innovative.
He sticked to the same style. It reflects to some kind of different elements.
Creative is a more individual factor, innovation is a more something collective.

What is therefore the link between knowledge and innovation?

Definition
The Oslo Manual for measuring innovation defines four types of innovation: product
innovation, process innovation, marketing innovation and organizational innovation.
 Product innovation: A good or service that is new or significantly improved. This
includes significant improvements in technical specifications, components and
materials, software in the product, user friendliness or other functional
characteristics.
 Process innovation: A new or significantly improved production or delivery method.
This includes significant changes in techniques, equipment and/or software.
 Marketing innovation: A new marketing method involving significant changes in
product design or packaging, product placement, product promotion or pricing.
 Organizational innovation: A new organizational method in business practices,
workplace organization or external relations.

Innovation is…
• Is knowledge-based process including stages: identification, design, development and
launching a new product
• About people: skills, personality
• Culture: national or corporate or both
• About practice: best


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,Innovation is a business




Organizational theories of innovation

Sometimes it’s better to see a project fail, than only look at success story. There’s a higher
learning curve. Not looking at best practices, but what is really important to not be
destroyed.

Technology S-curve
Captures the potential for technological improvement resulting from a given amount of
engineering efforts which varies over
time. Potential at the beginning of
the life cycle is great and then
increasing engineering effort has
diminishing returns to performance
of the technology. There’s a ‘natural
or physical limit’, so you can keep
putting money in it, but there will be
a limit to the innovation. It’s not a
linear process. There’s a point where
you have a ceiling and can’t go any
further  usually, then a new
technology comes. The knowledge
behind it is the cumulative learning process.

It is not about creativity; it can be something existing yet, however it is what you do with it
 that is creativity.




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, Innovation is risky…
Evidence shows that innovation is by no means automatically successful, and that even
commitment of large amounts of resources to the problem does not guarantee success.

It is a risky and uncertain activity, with many variables, including the technology itself, the
nature of the competition, the market context into which it might be launched, the wider
social and political context, etc.

Radical innovation
What is radical? Google glasses are not radical, because glasses already exist -> more a
product innovation. Even time travelling will still be built up from existing theories.
Bitcoins, similar to google glasses: transaction already exists.
If you take time as an element, thing might become more radical. For instance, the way
people conduct business is different with bitcoin.

Conclusion: always look at what type of innovation you’re dealing with and look at the
timeline. Radical is based on the length of time. There’s no wrong or right answer.

Questions to answer whether something is radical:
 Is it new to the world?
 New to the industry?
 New to the company with a significant upgrade existing product?
 Minor modification, existing product?

Technological forecasting
Technology forecasting attempts to predict the future characteristics of useful
technological machines, procedures or techniques. It is about predicting trends and
trajectories.

Primarily, a technological forecast deals with the characteristics of technology, such as levels
of technical performance, like speed of a military aircraft, the power in watts of a particular
future engine, the accuracy or precision of a measuring instrument, the number
of transistors in a chip in the year 2015, etc. The forecast does not have to state how these
characteristics will be achieved.

Secondly, technological forecasting usually deals with only useful machines, procedures or
techniques. This is to exclude from the domain of technological forecasting those
commodities, services or techniques intended for luxury or amusement.

A technological forecast consists of four elements:
• The technology that is being forecast
• The time of the forecast
• A statement of characteristics of the technology
• A statement of the probability associated with the forecast

It is a logistic curve:



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