Mopsos

Lowell L. Bryan in the McKinsey Quarterly 2004 Number 3, wrote an interesting article advocating market economics to foster knowledge sharing in corporate environments.

In short, effectively exchanging knowledge on a company-wide basis is much less a technological problem than an organizational one: encouraging people who do not know each other to work together for their mutual self-interest. There is, of course, a well-known, well-tested solution to making it possible to exchange items of value among parties who don't know each other. We call it a market.

Yes and no.

On the one hand, market economics are certainly far better than the tyranny of org charts, territories and budgets when it comes to sharing knowledge, as the fall of the Soviet Union demonstrated. Besides, they are likely to be more easily accepted by corporate staffs, because they have been taught for a long time in business schools, and because they can be monitored and measured.

On the other hand, I don't think that knowledge sharing can be fully described as a market, even in business settings. As Howard Stevenson, a Harvard Business School, once wrote something like: "Markets appear when organizations fail, not the other way around" (He's quoted somewhere in Tom Stewart's "Wealth of Knowledge" but I can't find where). The dynamics of knowledge sharing communities show that social obligation and emotions play a key role in maintaining the flow of knowledge within the group. And surely it benefits everyone, but, in some cases, it can be more a question of self fulfilment than a question of self interest, like when retired people are happy keep the conversation going with junior people just for the sake of transmitting their wisdom to the next generation (Happy grand-parents do that!). Can we talk about market economics within a family circle? Some families do, especially in the US, but these are usually not very tightly bound together.

Ultimately, the economics of knowledge have something to do with the economics of love.

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