Inside ‘Inside View’: reflections on stimulating debate and engagement through a multimedia live theatre production on the dilemmas and issues of pre-natal screening policy and practice

Background The role of applied theatre in engaging both lay and professional publics with debate on health policy and practice is an emergent field. This paper discusses the development, production performance and discussion of ‘Inside View’.1 Objectives The objectives were to produce applied theatre from research findings of a completed study on genetic prenatal screening, exploring the dilemmas for women and health professionals of prenatal genetic screening, and to engage audiences in debate and reflection on the dilemmas of prenatal genetic screening. Methods ‘Inside View’ was developed from a multidisciplinary research study through identification of emergent themes from qualitative interviews, and development of these by the writer, theatre producer and media technologist with input from the researchers. Findings Inside View was performed in London and the Midlands to varied audiences with a panel discussion and evaluation post performance. The audiences were engaged in debate that was relevant to them professionally and personally. Knowledge translation through applied theatre is an effective tool for engaging the public but the impact subsequently is unclear. There are ethical issues of unexpected disclosure during discussion post performance and the process of transforming research findings into applied theatre requires time and trust within the multidisciplinary team as well as adequate resourcing.

Editorial

This second issue of Knowledge Management Research & Practice (KMRP) continues the international nature of the first issue, with papers from authors based on four different continents. There are five regular papers, plus the first of what is intended to be an occasional series of 'position papers' from respected figures in the knowledge management field, who have specific issues they wish to raise from a personal standpoint. The first two regular papers are both based on case studies. The first is 'Aggressively pursuing knowledge management over two years: a case study a US government organization' by Jay Liebowitz. Liebowitz is well known to both academics and practictioners as an author on knowledge management and knowledge based systems. Government departments in many Western countries must soon face up to the problems that will occur as the 'baby boomer' generation reaches retirement age over the next decade. This paper describes how one particular US government organization has attempted to address this situation (and others) through the introduction of a knowledge management initiative. The second case study paper is 'Knowledge creation through the synthesizing capability of networked strategic communities: case study on new product development in Japan' by Mitsuru Kodama. This paper looks at the importance of strategic communities - communities that have strategic relevance and support - in knowledge management. Here, the case study organization is Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), a Japanese telecommunication firm. The third paper is 'Knowledge management and intellectual capital: an empirical examination of current practice in Australia' by Albert Zhou and Dieter Fink. This paper reports the results of a survey carried out in 2001, exploring the practices relating to knowledge management and intellectual capital in Australia and the relationship between them. The remaining two regular papers are conceptual in nature. The fourth is 'The enterprise knowledge dictionary' by Stuart Galup, Ronald Dattero and Richard Hicks. Galup, Dattero and Hicks propose the concept of an enterprise knowledge dictionary and its associated knowledge management system architecture as offering the appropriate form of information technology to support various different types of knowledge sources, while behaving as a single source from the user's viewpoint. The fifth and final regular paper is 'Community of practice and metacapabilities' by Geri Furlong and Leslie Johnson. This paper looks at the role of communities of practice in learning in organizations. Its emphasis is on metacapabilities - the properties required to learn, develop and apply skills. This discussion takes work on learning and core competences to a higher level. Finally, this issue includes a position paper 'Innovation as an objective of knowledge management. Part I: the landscape of management' by Dave Snowden. Snowden has been highly visible in the knowledge management community thanks to his role as the Director of IBM Global Services' Canolfan Cynefin Centre. He has helped many government and private sector organizations to consider their knowledge management problems and strategies. This, the first of two-part paper, is inspired by the notion of complexity. In it, Snowden calls for what he sees as a 20th century emphasis on designed systems for knowledge management to be consigned to history, and replaced by a 21st century emphasis on emergence. Letters to the editor on this, or any other topic related to knowledge management research and practice, are welcome. We trust that you will find the contributions stimulating, and again invite you to contribute your own paper(s) to future issues of KMRP.

How HR can inspire the teamwork that allows innovation to flourish

Innovation is vital if organisations are to deal effectively with social and economic change. Yet few studies have looked at the relationship between teamworking and innovation – or, indeed, other organisational outcomes. Our research aimed to fill this gap by exploring the extent to which team-based working in small- and medium- sized manufacturing organisations predicted product innovation. The results show that levels of innovation are higher in organisations using work-based teams than in those with alternative structural arrangements. We also found that effective HRM practices, such as sophisticated selection, induction, appraisal, training and remuneration management, created an environment that allowed teams to excel. The study drew on a variety of sources, including data on organisational-level innovation gathered through a postal survey. Respondents gave estimates of the number of new or adapted products developed in the past two years. They also detailed the percentage of production workers involved in making the new products; sales turnover accounted for by these products; and how far production processes had been changed to accommodate the innovations. We measured HRM effectiveness and the extent of teamworking via interviews with the relevant HR or production manager. We then rated each organisation on a scale of one to five, according to how effective its HRM practices were. We also examined the percentage of staff at management and shopfloor levels engaged in teamworking. The research design was longitudinal, in that the data on product innovation was collected six months to a year after the main questionnaire on teamworking was conducted. Other studies addressing these questions have tended to be cross-sectional, measuring both variables at the same time. Longitudinal studies generally make a stronger case for causality. Perhaps of most theoretical significance is the finding that teamworking combined with effective HR systems explains more of the variance for product innovation than teamworking alone. This is in line with J Richard Hackman (1990), who argued that organisational context affected team performance in various ways – for example, through offering a framework for the administration of reward and the exchange of knowledge and through promoting learning-oriented beliefs. Our work supports these ideas. This study also has practical implications. Increasing the number of teams may be an important step in determining the extent to which they can innovate on a sustained basis. Organisations should therefore consider what HRM practices are most likely to foster team innovation. They might, for example, explore how helpful it would be to develop team-based appraisal and better designed teamworking training. Developing support structures that enable teams to achieve outstanding performance may present a challenge, but our results suggest that such an approach will be worth the effort. Key points: • The greater the percentage of staff working in teams, the higher the level of innovation. • This applies to both management and production teams. • Where sophisticated and effective HRM practices are in place, the relationship between team-based working and product innovation becomes more pronounced. • Both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses show strong relationships between team-based working and product innovation.

Understanding inter-firm networks and types of innovation in SMEs:a social network perspective

Innovation is one of the key drivers for gaining competitive advantages in any firms. Understanding knowledge transfer through inter-firm networks and its effects on types of innovation in SMEs is very important in improving SMEs innovation. This study examines relationships between characteristics of inter-firm knowledge transfer networks and types of innovation in SMEs. To achieve this, social network perspective is adopted to understand inter-firm knowledge transfer networks and its impact on innovation by investigating how and to what extend ego network characteristics are affecting types of innovation. Therefore, managers can develop the firms'network according to their strategies and requirements. First, a conceptual model and research hypotheses are proposed to establish the possible relationship between network properties and types of innovation. Three aspects of ego network are identified and adopted for hypotheses development: 1) structural properties which address the potential for resources and the context for the flow of resources, 2) relational properties which reflect the quality of resource flows, and 3) nodal properties which are about quality and variety of resources and capabilities of the ego partners. A questionnaire has been designed based on the hypotheses. Second, semistructured interviews with managers of five SMEs have been carried out, and a thematic qualitative analysis of these interviews has been performed. The interviews helped to revise the questionnaire and provided preliminary evidence to support the hypotheses. Insights from the preliminary investigation also helped to develop research plan for the next stage of this research.

Achieving closure through knowledge management strategy

Case studies of knowledge management practices are often conducted in organizations where the aim is to manage knowledge for future operational improvements. What about knowledge management for organizations with limited life-spans that are preparing for closure? Such organizations are not common but can benefit from knowledge management strategy. This case study concerns the knowledge management strategy of an organization that is preparing for its final phase of operations. We facilitated two group workshops with senior managers to scope a strategy, following which the organization initiated a set of projects to implement the resulting actions. This paper reviews their implemented actions against those designed in the workshop to shed light on knowledge management in this uncommon situation.

Responding to crisis through strategic knowledge management

Purpose - Many managers would like to take a strategic approach to preparing the organisation to avoid impending crisis but instead find themselves fire-fighting to mitigate its impact. This paper seeks to examine an organisation which made major strategic changes in order to respond to the full effect of a crisis which would be realised over a two to three year period. At the root of these changes was a strategic approach to managing knowledge. The paper's purpose is to reflect on managers' views of the impact this strategy had on preparing for the crisis and explore what happened in the organisation during and after the crisis. Design/methodology/approach - The paper examines a case-study of a financial services organisation which faced the crisis of its impending dissolution. The paper draws upon observations of change management workshops, as well as interviews with organisational members of a change management task force. Findings - The response to the crisis was to recognise the importance of the people and their knowledge to the organisation, and to build a strategy which improved business processes and communication flow across the divisions, as well as managing the departure of knowledge workers from an organisation in the process of being dissolved. Practical implications - The paper demonstrates the importance of building a knowledge management strategy during times of crisis, and draws out important lessons for organisations facing organisational change. Originality/value - The paper represents a unique opportunity to learn from an organisation adopting a strategic approach to managing its knowledge during a time of crisis. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Making memories available:a framework for preserving rural heritage through community knowledge management (cKM)

While most of the research in Knowledge Management (KM) has focused on business communities, there is a breadth of potential applications of KM theory and practice to wider society. This paper explores the potential of KM for rural communities, specifically for those that want to preserve their social history and collective memories (what we call heritage) to enrich the lives of others. In KM terms, this is a task of accumulating and recording knowledge (using KM techniques such as story-telling and communities of practice) to enable its retention for future use (by interested people perhaps through KM systems). We report a case study of Cardrona, a valley of approximately 120 people in New Zealand's South Island. Realising that time would erode knowledge of their community a small, motivated group of residents initiated a KM programme to create a legacy for a wider community including younger generations, tourists and scholars. This paper applies KM principles to rural communities that want to harness their collective knowledge for wider societal gain, and develops a community-based framework to inform such initiatives. As a result, we call for a wider conceptualisation of KM to include motives for managing knowledge beyond business performance to accommodate community (cKM). © 2010 Operational Research Society.

Policy ideas through the prism of knowledge regimes and framing

Policymakers are often confronted with problems that involve ambiguity and uncertainty (Zahariadis, 2003). In order to make sense of such problems and to identify possible solutions, they are on the lookout for policy ideas.

AKTive Food:semantic web based knowledge conduits for the organic food industry

We present a vision and a proposal for using Semantic Web technologies in the organic food industry. This is a very knowledge intensive industry at every step from the producer, to the caterer or restauranteur, through to the consumer. There is a crucial need for a concept of environmental audit which would allow the various stake holders to know the full environmental impact of their economic choices. This is a di?erent and parallel form of knowledge to that of price. Semantic Web technologies can be used e?ectively for the calculation and transfer of this type of knowledge (together with other forms of multimedia data) which could contribute considerably to the commercial and educational impact of the organic food industry. We outline how this could be achieved as our essential ob jective is to show how advanced technologies could be used to both reduce ecological impact and increase public awareness.

The politics of knowledge in central Asia:science between Marx and the market

Through careful historical and ethnographic research and extensive use of local scholarly works, this book provides a persuasive and careful analysis of the production of knowledge in Central Asia. The author demonstrates that classical theories of science and society are inadequate for understanding the science project in Central Asia. Instead, a critical understanding of local science is more appropriate. In the region, the professional and political ethos of Marxism-Leninism was incorporated into the logic of science on the periphery of the Soviet empire. This book reveals that science, organizes and constructed by Soviet rule, was also defined by individual efforts of local scientists. Their work to establish themselves 'between Marx and the market' is therefore creating new political economies of knowledge at the edge of the scientific world system.

Climate change and knowledge politics

This paper addresses the paradox that although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reached a broad consensus, various governments pursue different, if not opposing policies. This puzzle not only challenges the traditional belief that scientific knowledge is objective and can be more or less directly translated into political action, but also calls for a better understanding of the relation between science and public policy in modern society. Based on the conceptual framework of knowledge politics the use of expert knowledge in public discourse and in political decisions will be analysed. This will be carried out through a country comparison between the United States and Germany. The main finding is that the press in both countries relies on different sources of scientific expertise when reporting on global warming. In a similar way, governments in both countries use these different sources for legitimising their contrasting policies.

The unique complexity of social phenomena and the uses of social science knowledge

The assertion about the peculiarly intricate and complex character of social phenomena has, in much of social discourse, a virtually uncontested tradition. A significant part of the premise about the complexity of social phenomena is the conviction that it complicates, perhaps even inhibits the development and application of social scientific knowledge. Our paper explores the origins, the basis and the consequences of this assertion and asks in particular whether the classic complexity assertion still deserves to be invoked in analyses that ask about the production and the utilization of social scientific knowledge in modern society. We refer to one of the most prominent and politically influential social scientific theories, John Maynard Keynes' economic theory as an illustration. We conclude that, the practical value of social scientific knowledge is not necessarily dependent on a faithful, in the sense of complete, representation of (complex) social reality. Practical knowledge is context sensitive if not project bound. Social scientific knowledge that wants to optimize its practicality has to attend and attach itself to elements of practical social situations that can be altered or are actionable by relevant actors. This chapter represents an effort to re-examine the relation between social reality, social scientific knowledge and its practical application. There is a widely accepted view about the potential social utility of social scientific knowledge that invokes the peculiar complexity of social reality as an impediment to good theoretical comprehension and hence to its applicability.