Development of Knowledge Management (4)

In Japan, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, two leading Japanese business experts, were the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company (1995), they provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally (Frappaolo, 2002).

In 1996 the World Bank began a strategic knowledge management initiative throughout the bank, initiated by the then president of the bank, James Wolfensohn.

In a series of Fortune articles, Thomas Stewart wrote about the intellectual capital, which led to his books Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations (1997) and Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization (2002). Intellectual Capital offers powerful ways of looking at what companies do and how to lead them.

Authors like James Brian Quinn, Thomas Davenport, Peter Senge, Paul Romer and Karl-Erik Sveiby contributed to the development of knowledge management. By 1995, knowledge management was a thriving topic of business discussion. Conferences and seminars proliferated - the first conference on knowledge management was held in Boston in early 1993, organized by Laurence Prusak among others (Prusak, 2001). The Knowledge Management Consortium (KMCI) was founded in 1997 as an international professional association of Knowledge Management practitioners (Frappaolo, 2002) and several journals were established:

 

Journal of Knowledge Management            
             

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