Intellectual capital is packaged, useful knowledge. For many organizations, knowledge management has become equated with developing systems and approaches to sharing information about customers and products and services to enhance competitiveness and improve those products and services. These knowledge management projects have included organizing written documentation as well as interviewing people to capture their individual knowledge. For our organization, knowledge management includes not only management of the diverse and distributed collections of information that represent our corporate knowledge base but also the definition of processes, technologies, and leadership strategies to ensure that staff have ready access to this knowledge. Our corporate knowledge base includes scientific and capabilities information, internal intelligence, and information about customers.
Effective access includes transparent and intuitive approaches, as well as shared and open access.
Vision may be described as an image or mental model of how things could be or could operate. Included in this mental model is how broad concepts and processes work together, as well as the cultural values needed to sustain the overall vision. Often, the greatest breakthroughs in scientific discovery are the most serendipitous, engendered by circumstances that support freedom of intellectual pursuit and ready access to people with a variety of backgrounds and ideas and to a diverse information base. Therefore, the relationship between users of the knowledge, effective access to all sources of knowledge, and the organizational values and culture must all be considerations in developing a model that truly reflects this vision. In the learning organization, the new 'dogma' will be vision, values, and mental models.