A pharmaceutical firm could go into real estate. Without some catalyst, without some real intervention, companies drastically underoptimize their knowledge assets. This has always been true, but there are plenty of reasons why it's more true now. Downsizing, for one. Suddenly the organizational memory, the institutional knowledge base, no longer exists.
Globalization is another reason.
It's harder for large, dispersed firms to know what they know and to know where the knowledge is. That sounds like a soft answer, but it illustrates a knowledge principle. Giving people the time to talk runs counter to the business model of most firms. But it's the wrong model. So you have to build in time for that.