Designing Knowledge Organizations: A Pathway to Innovation Leadership

A pedagogical approach to the principles and architecture of knowledge management in organizations

This textbook is based on a graduate course taught at Stevens Institute of Technology. It focuses on the design and management of today’s complex K organizations. A K organization is any company that generates and applies knowledge. The text takes existing ideas from organizational design and knowledge management to enhance and elevate each through harmonization with concepts from other disciplines. The authors—noted experts in the field—concentrate on both micro- and macro design and their interrelationships at individual, group, work, and organizational levels.

A key feature of the textbook is an incisive discussion of the cultural, practice, and social aspects of knowledge management. The text explores the processes, tools, and infrastructures by which an organization can continuously improve, maintain, and exploit all elements of its knowledge base that are most relevant to achieve its strategic goals. The book seamlessly intertwines the disciplines of organizational design and knowledge management and offers extensive discussions, illustrative examples, student exercises, and visualizations. The following major topics are addressed:

• Knowledge management, intellectual capital, and knowledge systems
• Organizational design, behavior, and architecture
• Organizational strategy, change, and development
• Leadership and innovation
• Organizational culture and learning
• Social networking, communications, and collaboration
• Strategic human resources; e.g., hiring K workers and performance reviews
• Knowledge science, thinking, and creativity
• Philosophy of knowledge and information
• Information, knowledge, social, strategy, and contract continuums
• Information management and intelligent systems; e.g., business intelligence, big data, and cognitive systems

Designing Knowledge Organizations takes an interdisciplinary and original approach to assess and synthesize the disciplines of knowledge management and organizational design, drawing upon conceptual underpinnings and practical experiences in these and related areas.