This month people from Aspect Communications, Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Compaq, Deloitte & Touche LLP, Fakespace Systems, and the Montague Institute met with Mitre staff at its Bedford location to discuss knowledge partnering -- how to make internal and external collaboration more effective. The discussion covered a wide range of issues but centered around three main topics:

• barriers to knowledge partnering -- what are they, how to overcome them;

• "knowledge facilitation" -- what is it, why it's needed, how it's done;

• collaboration tools -- what's available, how they are being used.

What is a "knowledge partnership?"
A knowledge partnership is a knowledge-intensive collaboration or joint venture among internal corporate functions or between a company and an external organization. Leveraging and sharing knowledge (as opposed to simply buying and selling) is a key component of the relationship. Partnerships, alliances, and joint ventures have existed for many years, but new technologies and business models make it faster and easier for partnership participants to share knowledge and even co-create new knowledge-based products and services. According to Al Grasso, Mitre CIO, "We've moved from the era of the 'value chain' to the era of the 'value Web.'" [In a "value chain" each company in a vertical industry makes money by performing some activity that helps to convert raw materials into finished goods. In a "value Web" companies from several industries perform a variety of activities to bring products and services to market. For example, delivery firms such as Fedex and UPS add value to goods from many industries.]

Knowledge partnership objectives
For roundtable participants, knowledge partnerships could serve many different objectives:

• Compaq Professional Services -- making project staff more productive following a major acquisition (i.e. Digital Equipment Corporation).

• Mitre Corporation -- transferring new technologies developed for its primary customers (federal government agencies) to industry, tapping the expertise of its retirees, and implementing a collaboration infrastructure.

• Fakespace Systems -- strengthening its position by acquiring related virtual reality technologies and forming a global distribution system.

• Aspect Communications -- promoting knowledge sharing when over half the employees work out of their homes.

• Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals -- using knowledge access and sharing to improve business processes, supporting communities of practice.

• Deloitte & Touche LLP -- incorporating internal and external information into business processes, providing better strategic information for clients.

• Montague Institute -- making it easier for Society members to share knowledge.

Identifying barriers to knowledge partnering
A major part of the discussion revolved around identifying and overcoming barriers to successful partnerships, such as:

• Assessing relative value -- How do potential partners assess the value of their respective contributions, especially those for which there is no market price? What, for example, is the value of an endorsement from a trusted opinion leader? When is a barter arrangement preferable to revenue sharing? Participants from Mitre, Fakespace, and Deloitte & Touche felt that sometimes the PR value of a patent exceeds the value of the potential revenue stream.

• Structuring the relationship -- With the new market players and new business models introduced by the Internet, it's often not possible to use traditional relationships (e.g. author/agent/publisher or manufacturer/value-added-reseller) to structure a partnership. But it's possible to borrow ideas from different business models, including professional associations, computer user groups, and Society roundtables.

• Fostering trust -- In the military and some industrial R&D, trust is formalized through such mechanisms as security classifications and non-disclosure agreements. In most successful partnerships, trust is the key element. While there's no simple formula, the Montague Institute suggested starting with a low-risk relationship such as non-exclusive licensing and progressing to a higher-risk relationship (e.g. joint venture, merger, or acquisition). Others emphasized the importance of face-to-face meetings -- early and often.

Overcoming barriers to successful partnerships
Several techniques to overcome barriers were offered:

• Completing the business system -- Much of the technology available from Mitre is in prototype form. To complete a partnership with a commercial company that wants to use this technology, Mitre often suggests third parties able to perform "O & M" (operations and maintenance) services such as testing, documentation, robustness, and user-friendly features.

• Finding an appropriate business model -- Deloitte & Touche has developed software that interests three major information providers -- but only if one of them gets an exclusive.

• Selling the "big picture" -- Public relations has two faces -- one that protects the organization from bad publicity and inaccurate reporting and another that educates the media and provides access to corporate experts. Mitre is working to create a better balance between the two objectives, and its IT groups have been more active in educating journalists about their accomplishments.

• Supporting informal knowledge transfer mechanisms -- Many companies, including Boehringer-Ingelheim, Compaq, and Mitre, use public "folders" (file directories) to share information. For people that know each other, these folders are a great convenience. In response to user requests, Mitre now plans to index the contents of its public folders to support information sharing beyond small groups.

• Compensating for cultural differences and conflicting objectives -- Several participants (Mitre, Deloitte & Touche, and Fakespace) cited a built-in tension in academic partnerships -- between a company's desire for confidentiality and a professor's desire to publish. Furthermore, university projects require more management overhead to keep them from getting side-tracked into areas that may be interesting but have limited commercial value.

Knowledge facilitation techniques
For Compaq, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Aspect Communications, and Fakespace, an important issue was "knowledge facilitation" -- how to enhance business processes, support communities of practice, and overcome barriers. Suggestions included:

• Appointing "knowledge stewards" that compile and publish specialized news alerts and "collection stewards" that maintain subject-specific Web sites (Mitre, Compaq);

• Hiring a "culture coach" to make corporate cultural norms explicit and define a common language for discussing business issues (Fakespace);

• Creating or joining consortia to enable practitioners to exchange information (Fakespace);

• Creating a new role called "partner formulator" to help identify and assess potential partners, define the relationship, and solve problems (Mitre);

• Focusing knowledge partnerships on business objectives and business processes (Boehringer-Ingelheim, Deloitte & Touche, Compaq).

Knowledge facilitation tools
Participants shared descriptions of knowledge facilitation software tools such as:

• A "topic detection and tracking" system that uses semantic analysis software to identify news stories that can affect a client's stock price and risk profile (Deloitte & Touche);

• A "collaborative virtual workspace" that provides a "virtual building" where teams can collaborate, communicate, and work on joint projects (Mitre, Compaq);

• Intranet "collections" or "portals" created to support common business processes such as preparing a proposal or managing clinical trials (Deloitte & Touche, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Compaq);

• An "intranet usage profiler" that uses Web site logs and employee data to produce demographic reports for "collection stewards. These reports show Web site owners the characteristics (e.g. level of education, area of interest) of employees that visit the site (Mitre);"

• A "Broadcast News Navigator" that collects and catalogs news stories that originate at major networks, CNN, and other broadcast sources (Mitre).

In addition to exchanging ideas, discussing common problems, and viewing a sampling of new technologies, some participants showed an interest in exploring partnerships with each other. Created on March 27, 2000 l Updated on December 22, 2012