Bringing Knowledge Out of the Shadows

Matching Needs With Latent Capabilities

Looking through our KM lens, we live and breathe a cycle of discovery on the supply side and application on the other. In between lies the all-important connective tissue, what we traditionally refer to as knowledge transfer.

On the discovery side, there’s no shortage of inspiring success stories. Starved and barely surviving, young Srinivasa Ramanujan’s scribblings were indiscernible by even the brightest minds in his poor 19th century Brahmin community in colonial India. Only after connecting with Cambridge University professor G. H. Hardy did his work gain the recognition it deserved. Today, over a century later, mathematicians are still gaining important insights from his work.

A similar situation occurred in 2001 in famine-stricken Malawi. Like many living in remote African villages, William Kamkwamba and his family lacked basic necessities, including electricity. From reading a borrowed textbook, he generated electricity for his home by cobbling together a makeshift windmill from blue-gum trees, bicycle parts, and scrap metal. His neighbors called him “misala” (crazy). But through a series of fateful interactions, TED conference director Emeka Okafor got “wind” of Kamkwamba’s craziness and invited him to speak at TEDGlobal 2007. As a result, he founded the Moving Windmills Project, which provides renewable energy, education, and water access solutions to underserved communities through locally driven innovation.

We can only wonder how many breakthrough ideas remain undiscovered simply because the right pieces did not fall into place. What better way to make those connections happen by design, rather than by chance, than for KM to provide the missing interstitial scaffolding?

Moving From Serendipity to Structure

Fortunately, there are many examples we can draw from. One is the Nigerian company Andela (andela.com). It recognized that software development talent existed throughout Africa but lacked connections to employers who could use it. Rather than simply training developers and hoping they would find work, Andela built a two-sided marketplace that actively brokers relationships between global companies and technologists from 130-plus countries. The best of both worlds, the emphasis on creating remote work opportunities means that talent can work anywhere in the world while remaining at home.

Other notable examples include the world’s largest virtual business incubator, AI powered IdeaGist (ideagist.com), and the decades-old Honey Bee Network (honeybee.org). These and similar networks have captured hundreds of thousands of ideas and provided support to turn them into profitable micro-enterprises and small businesses.

Building a Knowledge Infrastructure

As KM’ers, we have the means to build the knowledge infrastructure we’ve talked about at a global scale. Here are some initial steps: First, we need to move beyond traditional search. Keywords are close to useless when the holders of dark talent often don’t know what they know (sound familiar)? As such, they typically don’t describe their capability in terms rich enough to be fully captured and indexed.

The same goes for knowledge holders, who often don’t provide enough context to produce an adequate match. Generative AI offers many ways to overcome such shortfalls, including cross-connecting different ways of describing the same thing, inferring capabilities from indirect evidence, or auto-generating hypotheses about what might solve an exceptionally challenging problem.

Extractive and agentic AI also come into play. Rather than waiting for queries, armies of intelligent agents can actively search, probe, investigate, and respond on behalf of users 24/7.

All of this leads to the demand for greater contextualization. Knowledge graphs built on layered ontologies help reveal and map non-obvious connections between capabilities, needs, domains, and countless other association types.

These are just a few of the many ways we can bring AI-enabled KM to bear. Let’s not allow our KM skills to languish in darkness while the world struggles to keep pace. We have a golden opportunity to shine the light on this massive pool of dark talent and transform it into real economic growth.