• rewiring—connecting islands of intelligence by creating an information backbone; and
• reassembly—organizing pieces of knowledge from diverse sources into coherent, customized packages for customers.

Enterprises can fashion strategies for taking advantage of these opportunities to advance the enterprise mission through networked e-knowledge.

It may now make more sense to talk about a company’s distributed capabilities’ instead of ‘core capabilities’.

Mohanabir Sawnhey and Deval Parikh

Prepare to Use Expeditionary Strategies to Take Advantage of New Opportunities. Corporations, associations, government agencies, and even universities have discovered the wisdom of taking an “expeditionary” approach to developing strategies, products, services, and experiences for today’s market.

They realize that during periods of technology disruption, “killer apps” are discovered not through flashes of revelation, but through expeditionary initiatives that use product platforms as continuously adapting probes into the future. The killer apps for e-knowledge will emerge over time, not in a flash of dot.com brilliance.

In the words of James Brian Quinn, companies spot promising opportunities like surfers ride waves or scientists conduct research: by systematically observing environments, scanning ripples of opportunity on multiple horizons, and learning to recognize patterns of impending change, anomalies, or promising interactions that can be monitored, reinforced, and exploited. Enterprises need flexible knowledge platforms and the entrepreneurial skill to seize opportunity waves. This requires the systematic dissemination and trading of knowledge, even proprietary knowledge if necessary, to enable larger innovations that will leverage their own innovation’s value by an order of magnitude (Quinn, 2002).