• AHIMA and AAPS would most certainly have found that their relationship with members and customers (customer intimacy) was their most strategic asset, but only if they could use that relationship to engage the members and customers to be both consumers and co-creators of knowledge and insight in their fields.
• The University of Southern Queensland enjoys several vectors of competitive advantage. First, its relationships and reputation with satisfied students, educators and guidance counselors, and civic leaders (distributed across Australasia) provide the basis for a pipeline of future learners. Second, the nature of USQ’s learning experience (either purely virtual or blended learning) provides a distinctive, engaging, convenient learning experience that involves learners as co-creators and offers a highly competitive price.
• The Knowledge Network in the UK thrives based on developing a world-class product, public policy based on cross-departmental conversation and rationalization and the capacity to engage citizen feedback to tune and co-create effective policy and implementation.

Changing Market Leadership. Taken a step or two further, such an analysis suggests that e-knowledge is changing the dimensions of market leadership and competition advantage.

First, e-knowledge is an important instrumental factor in the creation of products, services, experiences, and knowledge. It can be leveraged to reduce costs, improve quality and timeliness, and personalize offerings.

Second, as products and services become more and more defined by the experience in which they are embedded or through which they are engaged, e-knowledge and interactivity become even more essential competitive factors.

Third, many e-knowledge-rich products, services and experiences are produced through co-creation with learners, customers, members, citizens, suppliers, alumni, and other kinds of stakeholders. Co-creation causes an irrevocable blurring of the boundaries between customer intimacy; products, services, and experiences; and operational excellence. New competitors can take advantage of the power of co-creation to unseat market leaders that do not provide the capacity to create indispensable relationships based on co-creation through communities of practice.

Making e-Knowledge Part of Enterprise Plans and Initiatives. The worse thing that can be done with e-knowledge is to create a set of stand-alone knowledge initiatives. Within many enterprises, that is what has happened to knowledge management and enterprise learning. They have become initiatives in themselves, not a strategic element of the enterprise’s workflow and business plans.

Experience dictates that e-knowledge must be part of a unified, varied toolkit that includes infrastructure development, process reinvention, knowledge management, enterprise learning, and fostering communities of practice. If effectively mobilized, the concept of e-knowledge can muster strategic support and generate a knowledge strategy that drives identifiable elements in the enterprise’s business plans and initiatives.