Two fields of research are heavily interested in developing visualizations for helping users coping with complex tasks and ill-structured subject matter resources: knowledge visualization and information visualization. The goal of knowledge visualization is to assist students in learning and problem solving by providing tools for fostering externalized cognition. The goal of information visualization is to provide knowledge-based access to information resources and help users in making sense of the resources they are looking for in information retrieval. The contribution draws attention to digital concept maps as cognitive tools which may provide a basis for the development of synergistic approaches that may help visualizing, accessing, and managing both knowledge and information and foster resourcebased learning.
Over some forty years, Stafford Beer (1926 – 2002) has published a steady stream of seminal books and papers in which he has applied cybernetic science to organizational problems. In all of these he has explained underlying principles and developed new theories and recorded a great variety of practical applications. In his last book, published in 1994 (Beer, 1994) he presents a cybernetic approach to knowledge management within large groups of about 30 people, called Syntegration. Syntegration is a structured, non-hierarchical process for highly effective and efficient dialogue that leads to much faster, much more informed outcomes and aligns people behind the resulting decisions, messages and action plans with a high chance for implementation. Since its invention this powerful method has been very successfully applied more then 200 times in the organization of normative, directional, and strategic planning, and other creative decision processes. The underlying model is a regular icosahedron. This has 30 struts, each of which represents a person. Each of the 12 edges represents a topic that is being discussed. An internal network of interactions is created by a set of iterative protocols. A group organized like this is an ultimate statement of participatory democracy, since each role is indistinguishable from any other. There is no hierarchy, no top, no bottom, no sideways. Beer illustrates how continued dynamic interaction between persons causes ideas and resolutions to hum around the sphere, which reverberates into a kind of group consciousness. Mathematical analysis of the structure shows how the process is determined by the even spread of synergy. The aim of this article is to present to managers and their advisors a new planning method that captures the native genius of the organization in a non-political and non-hierarchical way. That produces the best possible results in the shortest possible time from the largest possible number of people, by making optimized use of the knowledge these people have. Knowledge management at its best.
Due to the current economic situation the formation of trans-organisational networks is getting more and more important especially for small- and medium-sized companies in order to stay competitive. Trans-organisational networks consist of at least two legally independent companies or institutions whose aim is to increase the individual competitiveness and innovativeness by a closer collaboration without a legal integration. One form of such transorganisational networks is the Business Cooperative Network (BCN). By an objective oriented integration of the partners’ intellectual assets new products and services can be developed and marketed. Those synergetic results allow the achievement of the main objectives of the network as such and the ones of the individual partners, e.g. the increase of the competitiveness, safeguarding the economic sustainability and the further development of the individual intellectual assets relevant for core competencies. In order to allow an effective idea generation process for new knowledge based products and services, the intellectual assets of the partners have to be transparent. Therefore they have to be systematically identified, represented and combined. Until now there is no methodology for the identification of synergy potentials derived from the objective oriented combination of intellectual assets within BCNs. Based on the experiences of the authors in trans-organisational network projects a clear demand for such a methodology is given. Only by a systematic identification, representation and integration of the individual partners’ intellectual assets the objectives of the network and the individual partners can be achieved. The first step in the presented methodology is the identification of core competencies of the individual partners and the related intellectual assets. In order to identify the synergy potential that results from the objective oriented combination of the partner’ intellectual assets they have to be represented in a synergy potential identification matrix. It is the aim of this matrix to oppose the partners’ intellectual assets in order to identify potential products and services. The paper at hand presents this methodology and describes the different steps that have to be performed in order to identify the synergy potentials. Finally the experiences from an explorative study are presented. The methodology was developed in the framework of a PHD-work at the University of Linz and applied in a company that participates in a BCN.