Systemic Innovation

3The Management of Inventive Knowledge: From Inventive Intellectual Corpus to Innovation

3.1. Introduction

Knowledge management (or KM) is a field that, in 2020, is reaching maturity. According to Ferrary and Pequeux (2006), knowledge management aims to move from a working memory to an organizational memory, i.e. the formalization of knowledge that is accessible independently of the agents who created it. A theoretical framework and a practical framework for knowledge management have been set by Ermine (2018), who bases the virtuous cycle of knowledge on the analysis, formalization, capitalization, valorization and evolution of an organization’s knowledge capital. The illustration of the concepts of knowledge formalization and modeling by real cases (Saulais and Ermine 2019) further highlights the focus of knowledge management on the entity constituted by the knowledge capital and on the valorization of this entity by knowledge engineering concepts and methods, which will respectively constitute the formal principles and the strong arm of knowledge management.

However, it seems to us that, from a KBI (knowledge-based innovation) perspective, it lacks an essential characterization of knowledge, the depth of its inventive quality, in other words its potential for fertility in the creation of an intellectual work, in the sense of intellectual property (Saulais 2013, 2015).

As a result, we introduce the concept of the inventive intellectual corpus, a repository of the inventive ...