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1.3.4.3. The University and Knowledge Management
“Universities have no experience of valuing their intellectual capital and entering those values on their balance sheets” assesses Jennifer Rowley (2000) in her very fertile paper discussing the question whether higher education is ready for knowledge management. The paper presents a good analysis of the challenges and benefits for knowledge management in higher education, a theme that has become the main topic of a High Level Forum of the OECD two years later. The experts general assessment is summarized: “Despite being in the learning business, teachers, schools and education authorities are notoriously bad knowledge sharers” (OECD, 2002). The individual contributions (e.g. (Oosterlinck, 2002) or (Oakley, 2002)) do all raise some interesting points, but are generally rather descriptive and theoretic in nature. Quite the opposite is true for the short but very insightful paper “Applying corporate knowledge management practices to higher education” authored by three practitioners from Price Waterhouse Cooper (Kidwell, Vander Linde, & Johnson, 2000). The authors give a short overview of their knowledge management approach and then outline the application and benefits of knowledge management for research, curriculum development, student and alumni services, administration, and strategic planning. Another very valuable contribution is the organizational framework for efficient knowledge throughputs written by Piccoli, Ahmad and Ives (2000). Their report is particularly relevant to this research because there interest is to “fundamentally reengineer knowledge creation and delivery” in the university. In the entrepreneurial knowledge production and learning framework they have implemented at their university everybody, including the (learning) students; contribute to the knowledge product (in their case a piece of software). “Three entities, or engines, drive the proposed knowledge creation and delivery process. Faculty and researchers in the research engine provide guidance and set goals for the organization, while monitoring progress and evaluating results (knowledge acquisition and generation). Graduate students in the production engine, under supervision of those managing the research engine, produce and codify knowledge as part of their own training (knowledge generation and knowledge storage). Finally students in the learning engine, under faculty direction, absorb and apply the stored knowledge (knowledge utilization)” (ibid p. 232). This model is evaluated to be very interesting and a perfect instance of knowledge management as knowledge entrepreneurship. This case is however found to be the exception. Overall the OECD summary is correct, universities are in the prototype of a knowledge driven institution but they do not apply knowledge management, nor do they conceptualize it as intellectual capital.
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