Nature, value and pursuit of reliable corporate knowledge

Abstract

To innovate, a firm must create from permutations and combinations of many individual and organizational intellects a differential knowledge that could not spring from a single mind. Shaped by particular time and circumstances and emerging as if from a collective, corporate “mind”, this corporate knowledge can define a unique worldview for the firm. Given its centrality to the competitiveness of any firm, an important issue is the degree to which such collective corporate knowledge can be considered reliable. Ziman described reliable scientific knowledge as the product of a collective human enterprise to which its member scientists make individual contributions that are amended and extended by mutual criticism and intellectual cooperation. Uses an analogy with Ziman’s description of the scientific process to examine the nature and value of reliable knowledge in the corporate environment and the imperatives and possibilities for its creation. As will be described, the hallmark of corporate “reliable” knowledge cannot be its “correctness” but rather its synoptic and emergent nature.