TOWARD A KNOWLEDGE CONTEXT - REPORT ON THE FIRST ANNUAL UC-BERKELEY FORUM ON KNOWLEDGE AND THE FIRM

At the U.C. Berkeley Forum on Knowledge and the Firm, leading academic s and knowledge practitioners from Japan, the U.S, and Europe discusse d their understandings of organizational knowledge and how firms can i nfluence its creation and use. The meeting brought to the surface a di versity of goals, assumptions, and vocabularies-most notably a contras t between the aim of nurturing the process of knowledge creation and t hat of managing and measuring knowledge use. By exploring both common ground and differences, participants began to weave a knowledge contex t: a fabric of varied and mutually illuminating ideas about knowledge. Given the complexity of knowledge, this kind of rich context should p rovide a better framework for answering questions about how to approac h and value knowledge work than any single point of view could provide .