Establishing a 'knowledge commons' at the CSIR.

Abstract

Knowledge management facilitates team work & collaboration across boundaries. Gladwell maintains that “innovation, the heart of the knowledge economy, is fundamentally social. Ideas arise as much out of casual conversations as they do out of formal meetings. More precisely, as one study after another has demonstrated, the best ideas in any workplace arise out of casual contacts among different groups within the same company”. Casual conversations provide an opportunity for tacit knowledge transfer as they have the “advantage of opening the door to serendipity. They are opportunities for spontaneous meetings of the mind that have the potential to generate new ideas and solve old problems in unexpected ways” (Davenport & Prusak)