There is an article today on CFO.com by Lowell Bryan, for The McKinsey Quarterly, titled--Making a Market in Knowledge.
I have memory of Jerry Ash, of AOK: Association of Knowledgework, once saying that one of his favorite books(?) on knowledge only mentioned the word 'knowledge' twice (or at least this is my memory of what Jerry said in his AOK newsgroup forum).
Ah, the languaging of knowledge. This CFO/McKinsey Quarterly piece mentions the word/concept 161 times, in many different 'flavors':
accessible knowledge, acquired knowledge, codified knowledge, common knowledge, contributed knowledge, converted knowledge, developed knowledge, diffused knowledge, distinctive knowledge, distributed knowledge, exchanged knowledge, functional knowledge, high-quality knowledge, individual knowledge, internal knowledge, managed knowledge, proprietary knowledge, public knowledge, pushed knowledge, relevant knowledge, shared knowledge, specialized knowledge, strategic knowledge, and valuable knowledge
in a number of different spaces, with a number of different players:
knowledge arenas, knowledge creators, knowledge exchanges, knowledge management, knowledge markets, knowledge objects, knowledge seekers, and knowledge workers.
Well enough of my bean-counting, word-counting mode. Lowell Bryan ends this long piece with the following reflections:
"Knowledge by nature has a much longer shelf life than information does. Knowledge about how a competitor acts in the marketplace, for example, can be valuable to a company for years. But even the most distinctive and proprietary knowledge, such as that held by a company's best professionals, undergoes an eventual decay curve that terminates at the point where it becomes common knowledge. A professional possessing secret information on a key business issue may initially have no incentive to dilute its value by sharing it. But as others learn what once was secret, there eventually comes a point in the half-life of proprietary knowledge when it has greatest value to a company if its insights become easily and broadly available across the organization."
K-Collector Topics: Judith Meskill Knowledge Management Knowledge Organisation knowledge work AOK