Knowledge acquisition
All organisations should have a strategy to
guide the acquisition of new knowledge. In
order to have a viable future, an organisation
must have processes which obtain new
knowledge for the organisation to apply. This
new knowledge can be acquired in two
general ways:
1 Obtained from outside the organisation,
by purchasing it, hiring experts, or
licensing patents.
2 Created inside the organisation by formal
research activities, and by expertise
acquired through experience.
These processes are vital to the
organisation's future performance. It
should be noted that all parts of an
organisation generate knowledge of one
kind or another, and any or all of them
will impact upon competitive advantage
by various degrees. A few KM products,
such as business intelligence, and data
mining systems are specifically aimed
at knowledge acquisition. Other systems
(such as conventional R&D) serve the
same purpose but are long established,
and so have not attracted the ``new label''
of KM.