Various useful techniques were presented and discussed; good pragmatic and necessary approaches such as knowledge audits, storytelling, story circles/dialogues, team learning. As well as finding ways to engage and recall ex-workers for e.g. mentorship schemes, community facilitators etc etc.

The subject certainly provoked interest and discussion within the packed room with varying points of views raised and an active debate ensued.

Some of the interesting points raised was actually ultimately about whether retirees knowledge actually should be retained, shouldn’t we let the new vanguard drive their own vision of how a company should be run?  Isn’t “Organisational Unlearning” just as important.? Also maybe what is needed is some way that coming retirees can impart their wisdom and insights into various scenarios and workplace challenges.?

The discussion was active and could have gone on and on,  but alas we had to give the room back.

For what it is worth, my view is that there is a need to retain valuable knowledge, this much we all know.  The question is what to retain and how? Knowledge loss from baby boomer retirees is an issue, we need to be proactive to ensure that invaluable insights are codified or retained where possible and that important individual retirees can continue to bring value to the party.  They won’t continue to run the show, but their wisdom and insights on an ongoing basis can and will make a difference.   But will they be willing to come back to the party.?

Any and all comments are welcome

Related posts:

1. Reduce the impact on Knowledge Loss from Babyboomers retirement syndrome

Join us for this talk which will outline some measures organizations can adopt in order to retain critical know-how and reduce knowledge loss due to staff retirement. Supplemented with case examples, the speakers will share some solutions on enabling knowledge sharing and retention in an organization.

Event details
Date and time : Wednesday 16th May 2012 (6.30pm – 8.00 pm)
Venue: Conference Room 2, 22/F, United Centre 95 Queensway (Admiralty MTR Station)

The event is free for HKKMS and KMIRC members and $200 for non-members.

Registrations for this event have finished.  Photos from the evenings presentation and discussion can be found HERE

Speaker bios:

Cherie Lui Cherie joined the Knowledge Management Research Center as an assistant project officer since 2008. During these years, she has gained experience in the field of KM by delivering corporate trainings, KM courses, and assisting the supervision of more than 100 industrial based KM projects carried out undergraduate students.

Jessica Yip Jessica has been conducting Knowledge Management projects since 2008. She has worked with the Mass Transit Railway Corporation Limited (MTRCL), the Hong Kong China and Gas Company Limited (Towngas) and the United Nations (UN) in various projects such as knowledge audit, intellectual capital assessment, and knowledge sharing tools training.

Joining us at our monthly event on Tuesday 3 April will be representatives of the specialist software companies that are working on the problem of ‘Big Data’ .

The event will held in our usual location,  Conference Room 1, 22/F, United Centre, 95 Queensway (Admiralty MTR Station).

Time: Tuesday 3rd April 2012 (6.30pm – 8.00 pm)
Venue:  Conference Room 1, 22/F, United Centre 95 Queensway (Admiralty MTR Station)

The event is free for HKKMS members  and $200 for non-members.

Registration for the event has closed.

More details can be found below

Big data is big news and a big problem.

The numbers are staggering. To quote McKinsey:

• 30 billion pieces of content are shared every month on Facebook
• 40% projected growth in volume of data generated per year

Big data comprises huge datasets that cannot be managed effectively with traditional methods and tools. As well as large quantities of numerical data it includes vast amounts of unstructured data such as documents, emails, and social media messages that threaten to swamp KM and IT systems and processes. Before it can be managed and turned into valuable information and knowledge it has to be analysed and indexed and this needs new skills, tools and processes.

Speakers from Pingar, specialists in the analysis of unstructured data, will explain what big data is, how it can be managed and the value (and knowledge) that can be extracted from it.

Speaker notes:
Mark Lunt – MD of Pingar Hong Kong, has over 25 years experience in the IT sector in Europe, Australia and New Zealand and Asia.

Ryan Sin – Senior Technical Consultant, has many years experience in text and data mining, search and content aggregation and has worked in Hong Kong, Japan and China.

The forum will be held on the 9th February between 6:30-9:30pm at the HKPC in Kowloon Tong.

Further details can be found at the following URL:
http://www.hkcs.org.hk/edm/20120109/BIKMSIG_Seminar/

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1. Intellectual Capital Against Financial Capital Crisis

	The subtitle to this workshop was: “Whispered voices: Understanding Customers Better Than They Understand Themselves”.
A PDF of the workshop can be found HERE (file size 7.5MB)

As Henry Ford once said: “if you ask people what they want. they would say “a better horse”. Closer to home, nobody knew that they wanted an iPad until they used one – and Apple does almost no market research.

Systematic Innovation (derived from TRIZ) is a way of overcoming mental inertia for seeking new ideas that eventually become things of value. However, it still leaves the end question: who will value it? Whilst ‘one should never make predictions – particularly about the future’ something better than guessing user needs is wanted.

This is ‘TrenDNA’ which is based on a three million data-point 12 year programme of research that revealed some of the underlying DNA of innovation and change, including insights into why most change initiatives fail and what organisations need to do to make innovations succeed.

The start of an innovation processes is ‘function’: what function are we hoping to provide and who will value it? J.P. Morgan said “man buys for two reasons: the good reason (tangible) and the real reason’ – something intangible that he may not even know himself and may be more to do with status that usefulness.

So, who is the person who will most value your product or services?
This is where the principles of TrenDNA helps.

The first derives from the work of Harry Dent whose research showed the propensity to spend related to age. In the developed world, this peaks at about 48 years old.

The next two principles are about how people think and how one generation of people comes to influence the next. Since Maslow’ hierarchy of needs, Clare Graves, through a 30 years programme of research in great depth, laid the basis of ‘Spiral Dynamics’ (1998) which is all about how people think (not what they think). It suggests that there are eight ways that are named: Survival,Tribal, Feudal, Order, Scientific, Communitarian, Hierarchy and Holistic. People in one are not ‘better’ than others — just different and these differences have to be understood when determining if they will ‘buy into’ what you are offering. For example, the way of selling the idea of innovation to a highly successful ‘Order’ manager will be rather different from selling it to the Holistic one!

The second principle comes from the research of two historians William Strauss and Neil Howe (1998). They uncovered a number of patterns describing how societies seem to repeatedly pass through certain stages of hitting and overcoming the same problems. The most important of these is the way that parents raise their child will, in turn, affect the way in which these eventually raise their own children. The overall result of this is that society as a whole, at any time, has four generations with different characteristics which, in our time, are Generation Y, Silent, Baby Boomers, Generation X.

Of course, this does not mean that everyone fits precisely into any characteristic but the ‘flavour’ of an age group at any time tends that way and is meaningful to anyone trying to understand what they value.

All this now reaches the point of huge complexity so a tool is needed to manage create a map that not only simplifies it but also points to what we are seeking. This is done with a set of cards that provoke thinking and help resolve the contradictions that lead to an innovation that a group of people will value it.

TrenDNA needs the explorer to go through a number of stages of being provoked into thinking outside the box. It is not step-by step or ‘push button’ but requires commitment of some time.

Darrell Mann is an inspiring and energetic teacher and everyone enjoyed a stimulating and insightful day. We hope to get a repeat some time in the future.

Related posts:

1. Special Event : Whispered Voices – the DNA of Innovation
2. Innovation: creating valuable knowledge out of ignorance
3. Innovation as a Strategic Core Competence

Supporting organisations:

Registrations for this event have closed.  

Everyone knows that capturing the Voice of the Customer is a vital part of any  organisation, whether the enterprise be public or private, profit or non-profit, or focused on products or services. Unfortunately, what every organisation knows is that the customer is very often completely unable to tell us what they want next. They will know to ask for better and cheaper, but, to quote Henry Ford, what they are asking for is a faster horse and not a car.

So, they don’t know what to ask for beforehand, but as soon as they see it (or pretty soon after), they know that they want it. What can organisations do in this situation?

Based on a three million data-point 12 year programme of research, the workshop will reveal some of the underlying DNA of innovation and change , including insights into why most change initiatives fail and what organisations need to do to make innovations succeed.

Darrell Mann Director, Systematic Innovation
With over 800 papers and articles to his name, plus the best-selling ‘Hands-On Systematic Innovation’ and TrenDNA books, Darrell is now one of the most widely published authors on innovation in the world. Featured in ‘Who’s Who in the World’, Darrell is also recognised as one of the world’s most prolific inventors. His consulting clients include Procter & Gamble, Siemens, Petronas, RioTinto, SABIC, Eli Lilly, Nestle, Oman government and, through EU-supported research and dissemination programmes, a wide roster of SME organisations. His work involves a spectrum of applications from strategy development to IP creation to problem solving in technical, business and behavioural areas.

Programme:
Big Picture Overview – why so many attempts (97%) to understand customers go wrong and what successful companies do that the rest somehow fail to do.
Innovation = commercially successful step-change = Voice of Customer x Voice of System.

Outcome: an understanding of the DNA of innovation success and that there is a scientific way to hear the real voice of the customer

Voice Of Customer Dimension 1 – How We Think
Outcome: understanding the first critical dimension: why the way we organise information in our heads leads us into thinking that customers behave unpredictably. Includes a questionnaire for you to calibrate yourself against the various universal Thinking Styles.

Voice Of Customer Dimension 2 – Generational Cycles
Outcome: understand the second critical dimension: the high degree of predictability found in generational patterns. You learn what this means for the way we design our products and services and how to predict trends that haven’t started yet.

Voice of Customer Interactions – unravelling the complexities of societal trend patterns.
Outcome: practical tools that allow the complexity of societal trends to be mapped in a meaningful way and learning that the real trick to seeing the real voice of the customer lies between different trends rather than in them

Voice of System – Predictable Evolution Of Technical & Business Systems
Outcome: once we understand what the customer really wants, the next job is to deliver them the right solution. You will learn a pair of tools that will enable rapid convergence of successful solutions. Someone, somewhere has already solved your basic problem is the hypothesis; here we show you how to find them.

Putting It All Together
Outcome: an overall process that you can take back to your organisations. You are welcome to bring along their own future prediction problems and challenges to work on during the frequent exercises scheduled through the event.

Related posts:

1. Innovation as a Strategic Core Competence
2. Innovation: creating valuable knowledge out of ignorance
3. Innovation and collaboration in corporate environments

The first meeting of 2012 will be a KMRC/HKKMS joint sponsored event on the 17th January 2012.

The speaker is Annalie Killian, from Australian Mutual Provident (AMP)  who has the wonderful job title ” Catalyst for Magic”  Annalie is an award winning thought leader in driving enterprise collaboration and innovation.  This is a must attend event.

Join us on the 17th January at 7:00pm in Room BC305, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Quick synopsis of the talk
Whilst many other corporate programmes have faltered, the AMP innovation culture has steadily grown, and today enjoys a key strategic focus at the Leadership level.  Annalie will talk about how collaboration and innovation have joined hands to shift the culture of AMP, outline the eco-system approach she espouses, and explain the key role that the AMPLIFY Festival of Innovation and Thought Leadership, an event she created and produce every 2 years, as a catalyst and accelerator of change.”

Who is Annalie?
Annalie’s role focuses on cultivating a culture of innovation and collaboration, helping people across all levels explore new trends, experiment with ideas and emerging technologies, and find ways to apply or commercialise them. She founded AMP’s crowdsourcing innovation programme which has grown from a grassroots movement in 2003 to a company‐wide programme by 2009.

Fuller details of Annalie and this event can be found HERE

Please complete the form below to register for this event

Registrations for this event have closed.

Related posts:

1. Innovation as a Strategic Core Competence
2. Innovation: creating valuable knowledge out of ignorance
3. Use of Social Media to enhance collaboration, marketing and learning

We then had a fascinating presentation from Prof Eric Tsui, from the KMRC and Hong Kong PolyU, who presented his insights and research on the use of social media to enhance collaboration, marketing and learning.

The next HK KMS event will be in mid January, more news coming soon.

A few photos from the event follow:

Daniel Ng and Danal Blessis

Related posts:

1. Use of Social Media to enhance collaboration, marketing and learning

The speaker for the event will be Professor Eric Tsui who will update us on the topic of Social Media. A synopsis of the talk as well as a bio of Prof Tsui can be found below.

The event is free for HKKMS members, $100 for KMRC members, and $200 for non-members.  More information of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club, including a map of the location,  can be found at http://www.fcchk.org/

We look forward to seeing you at the meeting.

Use of Social Media to enhance collaboration, marketing and learning

Rising popularity of social software (aka Web 2.0) has lead to an exponential growth of user-generated content (UGC).  Prima facie, such a dramatic increase in the amount of information will lead to further information overload and complicate the task of obtaining useful insight and knowledge . Nevertheless, a positive result can be obtained if available tools and content are leveraged appropriately and especially among trusted networks. This talk will outline new developments in the field and showcase the results of several prototypes.

Professor Eric Tsui’s Bio:

Eric Tsui joined Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) in 1989 after years of academic research in automated knowledge acquisition, natural language processing, case-based reasoning and knowledge engineering tools. Between August 2000 and January 2005, he assumed the roles of Chief Research Officer, Asia Pacific for CSC as well as Innovation Manager at Australian Mutual Provident (AMP) and Maybank, two strategic outsourcing accounts at CSC in Asia Pacific region. Appointed as the Professor of Knowledge Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University under the President’s Distinguished Professionals Scheme in September 2002, he joined the university as a full time staff in March 2005. In the past 6 years, he has designed and delivered numerous public and custom-designed knowledge management and technologies workshops. He has also consulted for many government departments and private organizations in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei. Eric is Vice President of the Hong Kong Knowledge Management Society, an honorary advisor on KM to the Hong Kong Police College, and a member on IT Technical Advisory Sub-Committee in the Hospital Authority.

At the November meeting, Eric Spain, the Director of Innovation Insight, Hong Kong, followed up September’s ‘Looking behind the curtain: The impact of ignorance in German hospitals’ with the way valuable knowledge can be created ‘between the ears’ using a systematic processes.  He started with his own innovation: a map, for everyone present, of the story that he was to tell about the why, when, where, who and how of ‘The Issue’.

Eric then asked a simple but rather pertinent question: what is innovation?

His answer was: ‘Innovation is any change that produces something new of value’. Simple enough, perhaps, but something to think about. The important words here are ‘any’, ‘change’ and the idea of producing something ‘of value’. We are not here looking for change just for ‘the sake of change’: it must be something that is perceived as being ‘of value’. If it does not produce value, it is not an innovation!

• Over 80 per cent of attempted innovations fail
• Over 90 per cent that do reach the market will fail
• Over 98 per cent of university-initiated technology innovations fail.
• Over 90 per cent of innovations are delivered late, over-budget or to a lower quality than was originally planned
• Over 90 per cent of collaborative innovations fail

This can only be improved by a systematic approach, he said.   He is himself an expert in such a system developed many years ago by a Russian engineer, Genrich Altshuller (1926 – 1998).  By any reckoning, Altshuller was a fascinating man and his story certainly enthralled those present. He was originally an engineer who worked in the ‘Inventions Inspection’ department of Caspian Sea Flotilla of the Soviet Navy. He was in charge of looking after ‘inventiveness’ and had to document what people were doing for the patent office. His years of study lead him to create a system to explain how inventiveness works.

The subject interests all, but it obviously needs a great deal more study. The idea that it could be tied to a proven methodology was intriguing. It is certain that this will not be the end of any talk about Systematic Innovation.  It is likely to occupy many minds for a while to come.

A basic view of TRIZ can be read on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

Innovation Insight
www.innovasight.com

Darrell Mann Systematic Innovation.(books and software)
http://www.systematic-innovation.com/

The Altshuller Institute  (books):
http://www.aitriz.org/

Related posts:

1. Innovation: creating valuable knowledge out of ignorance