MIT Sloan Management Review

Human Resource Management and Industrial Relations, Management of Technology and Innovation

 

Managing the Knowledge Life Cycle

By Julian Birkinshaw and Tony Sheehan

October 15, 2002

Knowledge isn’t static, but it often gets managed as if it were. Companies that want to develop and use knowledge most profitably should start treating it differently according to the stages of its life.

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Most executives today recognize that their organizations must be able to manage knowledge effectively — it’s a strategic imperative. Just how they should go about developing that ability is the challenge. As in most other areas of management advice, there is no shortage of useful frameworks, models and checklists to choose from. Unfortunately, these solutions are generally undifferentiated; they are presented as applicable in any and all situations, and managers are left to make their own mistakes as they use one tool or another to ill effect. To take only one example, communities of practice, while immensely valuable in some contexts, have limited utility in others.

We believe that executives can begin to take a more nuanced approach to this issue if they realize that knowledge has a life cycle. Life-cycle models have already been usefully developed as a tool for thinking about products and technology, and the idea that knowledge changes form as it diffuses through a population is well established.1 The practical implications of the knowledge life cycle, however, have not been discussed in detail.

Over the course of a five-year study, we have devised a model to help explain the life of an idea in commercial settings. The model shows that new knowledge is born as something fairly nebulous (often in the head of one individual) and that it takes... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

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