| Knowledge Management - IEMBA Seminar |
|
|
|
|
Knowledge management’s (KM) original impulse lies in the divergence between the firm’s market and book values – recognized in Tobin’s Q as well as in the microeconomic literature generally. This gap forced managers to think about the firm’s intangible assets and the field broke into about four differently sized principal parts: information technology (IT), human resource management (HRM), intellectual property management (IPM) and the knowledge-based view of the firm (KBV).
This course will review the first three activities briefly before focusing on the fourth, the pursuit of a knowledge-based theory of the firm. We shall see the first three stand on assumptions about intangibles as measurable assets – the Balanced Scorecard and the Skandia metrics have popularized these ideas. We shall also see this is more a relabeling old concerns, especially those arising in accounting, than revealing anything new. The KBV, properly understood, is a radical attempt to grapple with issues that have bedeviled microeconomics and organization theory for a century or more – the question of why or how organizations, especially profit-seeking firms, grow. KBV theory reveals the theoretical importance of knowledge-absences, a particular form of uncertainty which leads to managerial and organizational responses. Ultimately it must be a theory of Entrepreneurship and leadership as well as of organizational change and firm growth in the tradition of Cantillon, Simon, Shackle, Schultz, Penrose and Romer. Most of our time will be spent on these basics, not only because of their academic importance and difficulty, but also because they enable one to reconceptualize the three parts of KM that stand on the notion of ‘intellectual capital’ – for that turns out to be a contradiction of terms.
|
Location: 88, blvd de la Tour Maubourg
Contact:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
CALENDAR 
