I knew we had a good discussion on personal knowledge management going back in June (see my post PKM - Are We There Yet? for some links to various threads). I'm still getting traffic, e-mails, and comments on it and this one from Greg Hutchins at WorkingIt.com challenges the whole concept of sharing knowledge, so it seemed worthy of a new post.
Greg commented: "... the problem with km is that ip has value. Why should one share when one can monetize?"
That mentality certainly causes enormous problems for KM practitioners and organizations hoping to achieve the demonstrated benefits of a knowledge sharing culture (to emulate companies like 3M and Google as I discussed in Connecting Personal KM to Innovation). From visiting Greg's site, I'm guessing he does not have a knowledge hoarding mentality himself and asked the question rhetorically. I suspect he knows quite well why sharing can be viewed as an indirect way to "monetize" your IP.
At the personal level, the simplest answer is that knowledge has the unusual quality that if you give it away, you instantly have more. You still have the knowledge you just shared. Plus, at the barest minimum (if the other person remains silent) you have added the knowledge that the other person now knows it too. If there is any conversation at all, you add additional knowledge about the other person's ability to understand your formulation of the idea, level of agreement or acceptance, etc. And if there is some true dialogue, you may get some highly valuable knowledge of what the other person knows.
More generally, still looking at it from the individual's viewpoint, sharing knowledge is at the core of Greg's whole concept of building your personal "brand" within your organization(s) and outside. In the knowledge economy, you are what you know. If you hide, or hoard, your knowledge, fewer people inside or outside your organization will have any reason to buy it (and I mean that in both senses of "buy").
More and more examples are emerging, showing the benefit to individuals from giving away their IP.
Look at the recent article, Give It Away and They'll Buy It, regarding Larry Lessig's book giving/selling "strategy" (180,000 free downloads of Free Culture, drving the hardcover sales into a third printing).
Or Dan Gilmore's We the Media (free download or purchase on the O'Reilly website, boasting an Amazon sales rank in the low four-figure range).
Aside: For a guess-timate of what Amazon sales ranks mean in terms of books sold, see this.
Seth Godin has built a huge personal brand, partly by giving away lots of his knowledge (his Web site has you click on his head to read his blog), while selling it in bigger chunks.
Within an organization, the rewards to the individual for sharing knowledge, both monetary and intangible (e.g. 3M's 15% program and retreats), must be made apparent and reliable. If organizations can manage to invest in creating a knowledge sharing culture, the huge returns in innovation and problem-solving capacity are proven.
If organizations cannot (see Can law firms even do KM?), then individual knowledge workers will need to follow Greg's advice and build their own brand outside. Sharing their knowledge will still be part of the solution, as the free articles on Greg's Web site demonstrate.
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