The Place to Make Connections Is the Marketplace

The Place to Make Connections Is the Marketplace

Tom Stewart

Knowledge management is about making connections, not collections, emphasized Tom Stewart in his animated speech to the Amsterdam audience. Stewart is author of the book Intellectual Capital and a member of the Board of Editors of Fortune magazine.

Taking an historical perspective, Stewart reviewed how Amsterdam in the 17th century was the hub of one of the world´s leading economies because the Dutch had two characteristics: They were early mapmakers of the world, leading them to treasures all over the world that they could bring home via their commercial fleets; and they built the warehouses to store the goods they brought home.

Stewart´s metaphor, that a marketplace needs both maps and a storage place, adapts well to yet2.com´s business model. yet2.com is creating both a storehouse of technologies available for license or sale and creating pathways between technology owners and searchers to enable trading.

Stewart also emphasized that any marketplace, even one online, needs people to make it work -- people posses the tacit, unwritten knowledge behind the goods to explain and add depth to the goods themselves. Applied to yet2.com, Stewart´s message illustrates why yet2.com assists in linking parties together so that they can meet face-to-face and negotiate their own deals off-line.

Gordon Brunner, Chief Technology Officer of Procter & Gamble corroborated the importance of making connections. In his keynote speech at the close of the conference, he highlighted P&G´s commitment to move from R&D to "C&D -- Connect & Development," in order to speed and improve the research and development process.

P&G has 8000 researchers at 19 technical centers in nine countries around the world. Forty percent (40%) of P&G´s research is non-US-based. Brunner has spent many years as CTO in building such an expansive R&D organization; his most recent projects were aimed at connecting the people and knowledge behind this vast group.

Brunner described a monumental R&D tradeshow that P&G recently held for its own worldwide organization at the Cincinnati Convention Center -- the first event of its kind in the company´s history. Not only were internal staff members from all over the world invited, but external partners, such as yet2.com, attended too.

P&G effectively created its own live marketplace to trade technology ideas. The company is trying to do this electronically, as well, with an Innovation area of their intranet web site. There, R&D staff post monthly learning reports in their project areas and can meet in cross-project "communities of practice" intended to provide the equivalent of informal lunch table conversations for researchers by research area -- all the microbiologists together and so forth -- regardless of the division in which they usually work.

Of course, not all organizations have R&D departments so widely flung geographically, or so diverse in discipline as P&G. But most -- if not all -- companies that do research to produce product for market can still benefit from the community and intellectual property marketplace that yet2.com creates between companies and among industries.