Overall Theme:

Knowledge Management

Theme 1: Organisations and Change: Structures, Governance, Resources and Strategies

• Knowledge and the organisation: creation, dissemination and use.
• The rise and nature of knowledge-based enterprises.
• Knowledge management: making sense of an oxymoron.
• Virtual enterprises, global and local implications.
• Culture and knowledge-based change: the impacts of national and organisational cultures.
• Public and private sector manifestations of knowledge-based change.
• Managing intellectual property.
• Strategies for knowledge-based change.
• Models, tools and technologies for knowledge-management.
• Collaboration and culture as business drivers.
• Knowing customers: managing customer relations.
• Learning organisations.

Theme 2: Human Capital: Its Role and Significance in a Networked World

• Human capital in a knowledge-based economy.
• Knowledge work and knowledge workers.
• Competencies and capabilities for knowledge work.
• Performance management and appraisal.
• Social talk and storytelling.
• Learning, training, mentoring.
• Knowledge loss and reinvention: human resources implications.
• Productive diversity: knowing and capitalising upon workforce diversity.

Theme 3: Knowledge-Based Economies in a Networked World

• New factorial mix: knowledge as the key factor of production.
• The qualities and characteristics of knowledge.
• Knowledge-based theories of the firm.
• Intangibles: their management and measurement.
• Concepts of ROI in knowledge-based enterprises.
• Innovation, know how and ideas.
• Scales of operation and levels of knowledge, where global meets niche.
• National and international knowledge creation policies.
• Economic underdevelopment and knowledge development.
• Asian ‘Tigers’ and the knowledge economy.

Theme 4: The Social Dimension to Knowledge-Based Change

• The borderless world: globalisation, technology and human kind.
• Information and knowledge as drivers of change.
• The North-South divide.
• The digital divide.
• EEO, affirmative action, diversity management and beyond—equity, equality and fairness in the organisation.
• The role of international agencies in building knowledge infrastructures.
• Using technologies to enable and transform.
• The role of education, training and learning in the knowledge economy.