Knowledge Management in Innovative Companies 1

3Capitalizing on the Organization’s Knowledge

3.1. Articulation of Chapter 3

The purpose of this chapter is to conceptually and practically explore one aspect of the second step of the knowledge management virtuous circle described in Chapter 1, which is dedicated to capitalizing on the organization’s knowledge.

In section 3.2, we recall the main concepts of these capitalization operations.

The practical exploration of knowledge capitalization will then be carried out through case studies of the INRS (section 3.3), code systems (section 3.4) and IRSN (section 3.5) respectively.

Section 3.6 summarizes the lessons learned from these three case studies on capitalizing on the organization’s knowledge.

3.2. Introduction to knowledge capitalization

An organization’s knowledge is a real asset that must be managed as well as possible. It is often interesting to make this wealth tangible in terms of information, i.e. to make the knowledge capital visible. Increased visibility in terms of knowledge capital has many advantages. This seems obvious with regard to the objectives of knowledge management: capitalization (in the non-economic sense, close to “memorization”), sharing (better transmission, especially on a larger scale), what is visible and creation, particularly in interaction with flows from the environment.

There are many approaches that can improve visibility of knowledge capital. One of the most common is to work on the concept of information capital, which is already tangible. ...