Interview with Professor Li Rongbin, the initiator of the MIKE Award | Knowledge empowerment for the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises, ecological sharing is a path to the future.

For more than 20 years, with the implementation, enlightenment, and promotion of knowledge management in China, the value of knowledge empowerment has gradually become a consensus! In the era of big data, where is the path for knowledge management? Where is the breakthrough for small and medium-sized enterprises in KM? What value does the most innovative knowledge-based organization award (MIKE) hold? With these questions, we interviewed Professor Li Rongbin, former director of the Knowledge Management and Innovation Research Center at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and coordinator of the global MIKE research team.
 

More and more Chinese enterprises are taking the global stage through knowledge management.

Q: Based on your years of research, can you talk about the development of knowledge management in the country over the years?

A: The development of knowledge management in the country, after its initial emergence at the end of the last century, saw many enterprises enter a stage of exploration and practice. At that time, China had just successfully bid for the Olympic Games and sent a team to Sydney to learn from their experience, discovering that the Olympic Committee had an excellent tradition of summarizing the experiences and emergencies of past Olympic Games for future hosts to reference and use. This was a successful case for promoting knowledge management.

Through visits and exchanges, I found that many outstanding enterprises in mainland China have already done a lot in knowledge management, such as Baosteel, Qingdao Beer, COFCO, SF Express, and Huawei, whose knowledge management practices are both deep and broad, refreshing to see.

Against the backdrop of more and more enterprises engaging in knowledge management practices, the "Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises" (MAKE) award, known as the international knowledge management "Oscar," was introduced to mainland China in 2011 by Lanling, which has been deeply involved in knowledge management for many years. Seven companies, including Baosteel, China Merchants Bank, China Merchants Securities, and Siemens China, were the first to receive the MAKE award; in 2018, Tsinghua University's Technology Innovation Research Center and Lanling co-hosted the MIKE award for the most innovative knowledge-based organizations in China, with companies like China Southwest Architectural Design Institute being recommended for the global MIKE award. Many enterprises have deepened the application of knowledge management through benchmarking practices.

"In recent years, I have deeply felt that knowledge management is penetrating more industries from education, automotive, real estate, finance, fast-moving consumer goods, manufacturing, and comprehensive groups, and the value of knowledge management is gaining broader recognition and promotion. More and more outstanding Chinese enterprises are taking the global stage and competing with world-class enterprises in the field of knowledge management."

Q: What are the notable differences between knowledge management in Hong Kong and the mainland?

A: Data shows that at its peak, Hong Kong employed 8 million people directly or indirectly in the manufacturing industry in the Pearl River Delta 20 years ago. At that time, Hong Kong businesses had a strong radiation ability, introducing a complete set of production and supply chain management concepts and practices to the mainland, positively impacting the management of mainland enterprises. In a certain sense, this can also be seen as a form of knowledge transfer. Looking globally, there are very few cases of such close, continuous, and effective knowledge transfer as that between Hong Kong and the mainland. Based on the shared identity of being Chinese, this is one of the contributions Hong Kong has made to the motherland.

On a micro level, the application of knowledge management in Hong Kong is concentrated in large enterprises and public institutions, such as China Light and Power, MTR, Hong Kong and China Gas, Kowloon Motor Bus, and government departments like the Buildings Department, Correctional Services Department, and Police Force, all of which are doing well. The aim is to continuously improve service levels, quality, and work efficiency; of course, there are also older professionals facing considerations for passing on their experience after retirement.

Building a new ecosystem to empower the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises with knowledge.

Q: How do you evaluate the common perception that knowledge management is only needed in large enterprises, while small and medium-sized enterprises need it less?

A: I was once invited to speak on KM at an electronics company in Xiamen. After the company grew, it opened branches in other locations and needed to standardize and replicate the management methods of the headquarters, which involved many commonly used knowledge management techniques. The core of knowledge management is the extraction, accumulation, filtering, and reuse of knowledge.

"Small and medium-sized enterprises have high employee turnover. If there is a lack of attention and management, the knowledge and experience accumulated by the company can easily be lost or taken away. How to manage knowledge is an important task. It has been proven that knowledge management is not only useful in large enterprises; small and medium-sized enterprises also have a broad application space!"

Q: If small and medium-sized enterprises implement knowledge management, what better methods do you think can be used to promote and implement it?

A: Small and medium-sized enterprises generally have fewer staff and resources, so they usually focus their work on business and customers. How to apply knowledge management effectively is crucial. Given the limited manpower in small and medium-sized enterprises, it is advisable to encourage the use of some office automation (OA) software and how to leverage the internet to reach more potential customers. This involves some IT tools and platforms.

There are many commercial process software available, such as BPM (Business Process Management), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), HRM (Human Resource Management), and PM (Project Management). However, most of these are not suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises, as they are not only expensive but also have high maintenance costs, and many functions may not be utilized. If customization is required, the costs are even higher. Another important point is that none of the above functions are core parts of knowledge management.
 

What is the core of a knowledge management system? Generally, the knowledge possessed by employees often exists only in memory or in their minds and does not belong to the company. Most companies' knowledge capital, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises, is generally negative or in deficit. How to transform employees' tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge that the company can visualize (such as documents, videos, recordings, etc.) requires a KM system for storing and extracting relevant knowledge and continuously updating it. Creating a system that small and medium-sized enterprises can afford and that can adapt to the development of each small and medium-sized enterprise is a significant challenge.

To enable employees of small and medium-sized enterprises to participate, it is best to align with the company's and business needs to identify the necessary tools and applications. First, employees may lack a basic understanding of the methods and means of knowledge management. Second, general employees may not have the ability to select the appropriate IT platform. For the former, a common practice is to involve employees in KM training sessions. However, regardless of how good the concepts taught in the classroom are, if they are not integrated with employees' daily work through action learning, the effectiveness is often poor.

"A better approach is to organically combine KM training with the use of KM systems, allowing employees to design the necessary IT platforms themselves, making their own judgments about the key knowledge and support needed for daily work, and how to place various tools."

The platform can consider using open-source software, integrating downloadable components from the internet to create a customized knowledge portal, accessible to employees and customers through different security levels. Nowadays, learning open-source does not require a university IT background; an employee without a science background can learn to use basic functions after two or three months of guided study. This does not mean that other KM systems are no longer needed; as the company grows, a prototype of a KMS can continuously expand and integrate different units, thereby building an ecosystem. The above directions can promote the adoption of KM in small and medium-sized enterprises.

In the era of AI and big data, more dynamic knowledge spaces will emerge.

Q: In the digital economy era, what new changes will occur in the application of knowledge management in organizations? What scenarios are worth paying attention to?

A: With the continuous expansion of application boundaries, organizations' understanding of knowledge management is also constantly refreshed; since the emergence of Yano Yujiro's theory on the transformation of tacit and explicit knowledge, more and more people have discovered: knowledge management is not just IT, not just expert systems, it is more like an art, an interdisciplinary art that integrates management, psychology, and other fields, requiring profound insights and explorations of organizational and individual behaviors.

There is a famous movie called "Modern Times," in which capitalism turns people into machines, like gears, which brings about a reflection: what exactly do our employees produce?

Traditional enterprises sell products and services, where employees play more of a manual labor role, but in the AI era, as repetitive work is replaced by mechanical automation, the value of employees will be more reflected in their contribution of knowledge; after becoming knowledge workers, they will output not only finished products and services but also knowledge, and people should enjoy the process of learning and creating. With the change in practice, knowledge will continue to appreciate.

"The storage and distribution of knowledge within an organization is uneven; some R&D departments have more knowledge, while some finance departments have more knowledge. Coupled with departmental barriers, it is easy to form 'knowledge islands.' How to promote knowledge sharing based on the different 'knowledge terrains' of each enterprise is an important issue."

Digital technology continuously promotes the sharing of information and knowledge, forming a knowledge flow, where fixed storage gradually gives way to flowing sharing. The most typical example is the transformation of library functions, from the past of merely storing materials and providing literature to now supporting knowledge extraction and discovery for different learning groups.

In the era of AI and big data, knowledge is increasingly like a great river; how can you possibly store a river? Expert knowledge locked in knowledge systems is useless. Previously, IBM attempted to have many people, including suppliers and employees, brainstorm online for an hour to generate tens of thousands of ideas for the company to reference. This kind of wisdom energy is astonishing! In the future, the open innovation brought by flowing knowledge will overturn people's previous common sense and create greater value.

Transforming the MIKE Award into a global knowledge management exchange platform

Q: What is the original intention of establishing the MIKE Award for the most innovative knowledge-based organizations globally? How does it differ from MAKE?

A: The development of new technologies and management changes has triggered a wave of global innovation, with everyone from enterprises to government public institutions emphasizing innovation. The standards of the MIKE Award are based on the original MAKE framework but place greater emphasis on innovation, responding to this trend.

Based on the latest research on innovation, knowledge management, and intellectual capital management, the MIKE international expert group analyzed the main factors affecting organizational innovation performance and expanded them into eight new standards for the continuous innovation of knowledge-based organizations.

These include empowering knowledge workers to innovate, creating conditions to obtain/stimulate customer and user experiences/needs/experiences, developing open internal and external cooperative relationships, effectively enhancing enterprise efficiency, cultivating an organizational culture of innovation, investing in and providing knowledge-based products/services/solutions, demonstrating strategic, visionary, and transformative leadership, and using creativity and virtual space to create value for stakeholders. Additionally, innovation performance indicators have been added, allowing organizations to choose one or more measurement indicators that best suit them, providing data and evidence for self-assessment.

Q: What aspects of value enhancement can enterprises or organizations gain by participating in the MIKE Award?

A: At the 2018 Asia Knowledge Forum, the most innovative knowledge-based organization award (MIKE) was officially initiated by Tsinghua University's Technology Innovation Research Center, Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Knowledge Management and Innovation Research Center, and Lanling Software, aiming to further promote the popularization and sharing of the new generation of knowledge management globally.

Enterprises or organizations participating in the MIKE Award can gain value in three aspects: first, recognition of the innovative achievements obtained from good practices in knowledge and intellectual capital management; second, opportunities to learn and exchange with industry leaders and excellent organizations, enriching their own practices; and third, receiving constructive feedback from expert review panels for continuous improvement.

The international MIKE group, composed of professional institutions from more than a dozen countries or regions, will carry out sharing activities for innovative practices based on regional conditions, encouraging benchmarking learning and exchanges between different countries, using vivid stories and cases to promote experience sharing, and jointly creating a global knowledge management exchange platform to empower various organizations to innovate more efficiently and create greater value.