e-Knowledge repositories, marketplaces, and exchanges become the foundation for e-knowledge. The sharing and exchange of e-knowledge becomes an essential element of the e-Knowledge Industry. Horizontal marketplaces change the dynamics of publishing and learning support, increasing customer satisfaction and driving down both the cost and price of content. These marketplaces open secondary markets for enterprise knowledge, which creates a significant revenue stream for associations, universities, many enterprises, and individual faculty, researchers, and practitioners. These marketplaces also empower providers and demand aggregators who leverage their established relationships with learners in various settings.

Communities of practice become the epicenters of knowledge stewardship and autonomic learning. Communities of practice achieve amenity in facilitating knowledge sharing among peers. They also provide syntheses of insights to outsiders. Communities of practice become the epicenters of autonomic learning; directed/structured learning uses cohort-based models, drawing its learners from the community of practice and/or working groups.

Impacts of new infrastructures and knowledge environments reshape knowledge ecologies. Cycles of process reinvention create new knowledge ecologies that reshape the relationships between enterprises and their members, learners, staff, customers, and other stakeholders. These relationships are the basis for creating and sharing knowledge. They are also the foundation and fulcrum for leveraging learning relationships. Ambient knowledge environments provide new opportunities for knowledge sharing—involving individuals, teams, and communities.

Reinventing Business Models

The principles and practices of e-knowledge enable individuals and enterprises to “unbundle” their learning and knowledge sharing experiences. This is one of the greatest powers of e-knowledge. It appeals to the aspirations and motivations of individuals and most enterprises and enables dramatic changes in business models involving knowledge and learning.

The future of intellectual property industries lies in selling performances and relationships, not digital objects. Attempts to sell digital objects at increasingly higher prices can only succeed when the seller has a de facto monopoly. . . . Revenues for manufacturers and distributors of digital objects will drop steeply in the next 10 years in the World Without Secrets. It’s a good time for those players to think about how they are going to make a transition to a new business. They might start by thinking about what makes a company exceptional, or not, beginning
with its relationships.

Richard Hunter

A good business model begins with an insight into human motivations.

Joan Magretta, 2002