Knowledge Leadership Associates » knowledge networking

Intellectual property rights: is South Africa failing?

Peter G. Underwood — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 08:18:11 +0000

In the University World news (Issue 18, 18 July 2011), Sharon Dell writes that “South Africa’s current intellectual property rights regime is failing to support the national system of innovation and is actively disadvantaging local inventors while facilitating exploitation by foreign interests”. Her comments are based upon research by Anastassios Pouris of the Institute for Technological Innovation at the University of Pretoria and Anthipi Pouris of the National Research Foundation, to be published in the September issue of the South African journal of science. They argue that “while foreign inventors are able to protect their inventions in South Africa very cheaply, the same does not apply to local researchers who battle to protect their inventions abroad owing to far higher costs”.

Intellectual property rights: is South Africa failing? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Wikipedia — ten years old!

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 07:08:18 +0000

It has certainly courted notoriety since its implementation and has also received its share of plaudits. On 15 January 2001, Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales began a new project with the words “Hello, world.” Their next entry was “Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” Since then, Wikipedia has become the go-to online reference source for many seeking facts. Wikipedia has grown to be the fifth-most popular online destination in the world, and it draws in 410 million unique visitors a month. Recently, growth of new and discrete entries on the site has slowed significantly but this may be expected due to the fact that with 17 million articles, quite a bit of knowledge has been covered over the past decade. Andrew Lih, who wrote the book The Wikipedia Revolution, commented that it will be integral for the Wikimedia Foundation to reach out to large cultural institutions in the coming years in order to provide the site with new, high-quality material.

The Scout Report has assembled an interesting list of collection of comment about the development of Wikipedia. Daniel Terdiman writes on the history of Wikipedia in a CNET News article for 14 January 2011. In The Guardian, Clay Shirky writes an article on the enduring popularity of Wikipedia. The Economist considers the future of Wikipedia, whilst Casper Grathwohl, the vice president and publisher of digital and reference content for Oxford University Press, considers the longer perspective of the impact of Wikipedia on reference works. A short graphic presentation narrated by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales considers Wikipedia’s past, present, and future. Finally, here is a Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia.

Adapted from The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2011. http://scout.wisc.edu/

Wikipedia — ten years old! is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

2011 — It’s going to be VEVEM!

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 12:25:52 +0000

Very Exciting and VEry Messy — that is what Mark Anderson, a technology commentator interviewed on the BBC World Service, has to say about the year 2011. He asserts that a more explicit “split” between channel and content will become evident, this in turn, raising complex issues around what is “open” content and what is “secure”. Information security will become a leading concern for companies and other organizations, particularly around issues of intellectual property. Micro-applications will diminish in importance. Google is also recipient of some criticism, Anderson contending that it is a company that has lost its way and is no longer sure of what business it is in. E-book readers are predicted to make a big impact in 2011.

2011 — It’s going to be VEVEM! is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Are you working too hard?

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:09:49 +0000

Independent Online’s Business Report for 20 October 2010 reports the results of the 2010 LexisNexis International Workplace Productivity Survey conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia and South Africa. It has important implications for Knowledge Management. According to the results of the survey, South African professional workers spent, on average, 9.5 hours a day of the working week at their workplace, longer than any other country group included in the study. In addition, “the survey found that the amount of information workers have to manage for their jobs continues to increase at an alarming rate, with much of it irrelevant to employees getting their jobs done”. Not surprisingly, 82% of the South African respondents wished to be able to spend more time in using the information rather than organizing it; 88% indicated that the inability to find relevant information was a major time-waster and that this was having a deleterious effect on their productivity. The survey concluded that “Workers believe they could be more productive at work if the tools they had access to were designed to work the way that they worked.”

Are you working too hard? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

The collaborative inter-prise is coming to fruition

benfouche — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:14:29 +0000

While reviewing some the excellent recent contributions to the literature of knowledge management, it struck me again how prescient some of the older generation KM gurus were (still are?) in reading the emerging trends – even before or at the time of the dot.com crash. While the influential contributions of Peter Drucker stand out, I would like to remind knowledge managers of the excellent and very readable book of David Skyrme, Knowledge networking (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999). A decade after its publication it is still one of my favourites and a resource that I turn to from time to time. In the book he describes the advent of the collaborative “inter-prise” characterised by network relationships and linkages between an organisation and other players in its value chain to the extent that the boundaries of individual organisations tend to blend into networks. This is what we are seeing in practice today, enabled by Web 2.0 technologies. The book offers a wealth of insights and frameworks that are as valid today as at the time of publication. His website www.skyrme.com is worth a visit.

The collaborative inter-prise is coming to fruition is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates