Develop a Strategic Portfolio of e-Knowledge Initiatives. At any point in time, an enterprise will need to manage a portfolio of initiatives having varying objectives, ranging from improvement to incremental innovation to radical innovation. This will enable your enterprise to deal with the dialectic of enterprise initiatives, maintaining a balance between stability and dynamism, between operating in today’s environment and making a jump shift in vision to the e-knowledge future.

Leverage Relationships to Create New Products, Services, Knowledge Resources and Experiences. Like best practices and business models, enterprise strategies should begin and end with relationships. Mobile, networked e-knowledge provides a powerful instrument for establishing indispensable relationships with members, customers, learners, staff, suppliers, and other stakeholders who not only want it, they want to participate in its creation. So what is it about the relationship and the associated experiences that can be both indispensable and differentiating?

Relationship is the only thing strong enough to resist the siren call of ten million other sites that are just a click away . . . In the digital world, the one with the best conversation usually wins. And I assure you that there are many dialogues out there still in search of a village square.

Mikela Tarlow, 2002

There are as many answers to this question as there are individuals seeking knowledge or engaging in learning. It seems clear, however, that in the information surfeit of the attention economy, most individuals will forge indispensable relationships with a relatively small number of trusted organizations, associations, institutions, and enterprises whose brand has been affirmed as meaning “giving me the knowledge I want, when I need it, efficiently, and as part of an engaging experience.” Sounds like a strategy for success.

In Chapter 4, we introduced a quote by H.G. Wells expressing the potential for marshalling the fragmented knowledge resources around the world to address the difficulties of the age. This grand idea could not be implemented 60 years ago because we lacked the technology and the capacity, let alone the will. In the near future, we shall possess the technologies and tradecraft to attempt Wells’ vision. We have come to comprehend the complexity of knowledge and the importance of culture and knowledge ecology in establishing meaning. What will the future of e-knowledge hold for the receiving, sorting, summarizing, digesting, clarifying, and comparing of the knowledge and ideas of our time? We shall all participate in crafting the answer.

An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearing house: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified, and compared.

H.G. Wells, 1940