Georg von Krogh: I think we have come to better understand what knowledge management is all about. We have seen the first wave of knowledge management, focusing on initiatives that started locating and capturing knowledge. … Hofman-La Roche was very successful in creating business information systems to capture knowledge about competitors, about new scientific trends and developments–to really build knowledge bases, in a sense.

The next challenge, the second wave, focused much more on sharing and transferring knowledge. This focuses more on knowledge which has been captured locally in the organization. … Chevron and Dow Chemical, with their best practice sharing and best practice transfers, are good examples of companies in the second stage. Another company is ABB with its competency centers that facilitate technology and knowledge transfer across business units in local countries. So that was the second phase.

The companies that survived this might move into the third stage of knowledge management, which is really about generating or creating new knowledge. …Of the knowledge creating companies today, I think I would emphasize Nokia as a very impressive example; also Skandia. Skandia, with their future center, really takes the issue of creating new knowledge and visioning what kind of knowledge we need for the future seriously.

Blind Spot 1: Where Are the Sources of Rent?

Blind Spot 2: High Mobility and Low Loyalty of Human Capital

Blind Spot 3: Understanding the "Task-Creating Company"

Blind Spot 4: The Role of Leadership in the Knowledge Economy

And as you know, care is very important to me as a concept. Trust is exchange-based; care is voluntary cooperation and voluntary giving. Care is a gift… A person needs care from childhood on in order to develop into a "full" person… Care includes but extends far beyond trust…. Tacit knowledge-sharing is impossible without care. Leadership is very strongly affected by caring…

Care is the fundamental concept that drives attention. So if I care for something I pay attention to that particular thing. It’s very fundamental, and perhaps it cannot be decomposed–or if you look at the heart of it, care is even the source of love, because it’s what drives attention. So if you pay attention to something, you might start to love some aspect of it over time.

I want to understand processes of routinization, because the routine could be a certain source of competitive advantage. … I want to understand how knowledge in the organization, highly fluid and distributed, quickly turns into a routine. Some routines survive and other routines die. The factors influencing routinization in organizations are something that I really don’t understand. I also want to understand this evolutionary battle of routines. And here the debates on distribution, justification, and economic rationality are at the core…

We don’t know, says Georg von Krogh, what the source of rent is for the knowledge-based firm. With this claim von Krogh points at an important blind spot of the current discussion in management: the lack of a knowledge-based theory of the firm. Krogh is particularly interested in the topic of routinization: how does knowledge (human capital) become incorporated into routines (structural capital)? At the heart of von Krogh’s work is the notion of care. The care that one has for something or someone, according to von Krogh, drives the attention that one pays to it. Care is the single most important capability of companies to operate in knowledge-based business environments. It is strongly related to the notion of love that is elaborated in the interviews with Joseph Jaworski, Ryosuke Ohashi, Ikujiro Nonaka, Eleanor Rosch and Francisco Varela.

Georg von Krogh is a professor, director of the Institute of Management, and co-founder of the research center KnowledgeSource at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. His main research interests are strategy, technological innovation, and knowledge management. He has been a visiting professor at several universities, including the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Prof. von Krogh has written several articles and books on knowledge management, including (with K. Ichijo and I. Nonaka) Enabling Knowledge Creation (Oxford University Press, 2000). He is an editorial board member of many international journals.