The HBR article by C.K. Prahalad and Jeb Brugmann that I wrote about on Feb. 4 also contains some interesting insights that lend further credence to the importance of understanding knowledge management and organizational learning and their relation to success in social responsibility. This is of interest to me because it is my academic background — and what I teach at Northwestern University’s Learning & Organizational Change program.
Prahald and Brugmann lay out three major areas where companies and NGOs find common ground:
- Pooling knowledge, competencies and relationships to build new operating standards and co-regulation schemes.
- Leveraging each other’s credibility and social networks to create access to markets and brand value.
- Creating professional development norms and management roles to facilitate coordination between the two sectors.
Each of these common ground areas involves sharing knowledge and creating new knowledge — and the authors pointed out examples of where collaboration between companies and NGOs in each of these areas resulted in some type of operating innovation or new business model.
It seems that this space — this new intersection between companies and NGOs — may be a fertile field for organizational innovation (if you buy into the Prahalad/Brugmann line of thinking). But what I also see is a field where the tools of knowledge management and organizational learning can be applied to accelerating the pace of innovation.
Examples of the tools? Appreciative inquiry, communities of practice, action learning, social network analysis, methods to motivate reflection…and more. The point is: Putting organizations together in a process to explore common ground will generate innovation. Applying what we know about knowledge creation and organizational learning to the same process will make it work faster…
