Productivity is THE buzz word in Singapore. It is. In his 2010 budget speech, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the Singapore Finance minister, announced that the government is going to commit a cool $1.1 billion a year over the next five years in the form of tax benefits, grants, and training subsidies to raise the national productivity. Companies who are keen to tap on this fund, can apply for Productivity and Innovation Credit (PIC).

$1.1 billion a year. That’s a lot of money! Don’t you wish that you are a Productivity or Innovation Guru, instead of a KMer? Well, don’t give up just yet! I believe Knowledge Management (KM), Productivity, and Innovation are inter-linked.

But before I talk about that, allow me to say this: Productivity as well as Innovation must be meaningful for the organisation. What do I mean by meaningful? Productivity and Innovation must have a purpose. You can’t simply say your goal is to increase your workforce productivity and to have more innovations. Why do you want them? One reason could be, because your competitors can offer more innovative products, and therefore, you have to step up your innovation efforts before you get crushed by competition. Communicate clearly this purpose to all your staff and, chances are, you would get higher staff engagement.

Okay, back to the main topic. How can we (KMers) get some of that $1.1 billion per year fund? First and foremost, we need to establish the relationship among KM, Innovation, and Productivity – which can be depicted in the following chart:

Allow me to explain the chart from KM perspective.

1. Good Practice (i.e. Best Practice). This kind of KM is IT-heavy. It is about establishing best practice database, or knowledge base, so that staff could search a set of standard practices / procedures in the organisation. It is very popular in the manufacturing industry, under the banner of quality management. Of course, it is also popular in the IT industry. Microsoft’s knowledge base is a prime example of this. Innovation in the “Good Practice” KM is about creating or improving tools to enforce standards and ensure compliance. For example: e-learning software to educate staff on the “Good Practice”, automation software. Here, Productivity is achieved by doing more things in a shorter time period. It is the old-fashioned Productivity, which is measured by output divided by input. The Productivity achieved is lower as compared to the other two types of KM, because the human element is taken out of the equation.
2. Positive Deviance. To find positive deviance, you need to connect people so that they can share their experience and ideas. Positive Deviance is stories-rich. People usually share their (tacit) knowledge in the form of stories. In addition, you also require design thinkers who can see the association among ideas / stories, or do what Steve Jobs called “connecting the dots”. This requires imagination. Who could have thought – other than design thinkers - that NASA holds the solution for Chile’s trapped miners? That is what I mean by imagination, or what Daniel Pink termed as ”symphony”. Innovation in the “Positive Deviance” KM, is incremental. It is about innovating on other people’s ideas and adapting them to the appropriate context. This would shorten the Innovation cycle and thus result in Productivity gain. The faster you could “steal” ideas and apply them in appropriate context, the bigger productivity gain that you would get.
3. Crowdsourcing. Radical Innovation can shoot-up Productivity gain, provided the radical innovation is a successful one. There is no fixed formula that can guarantee successful radical innovation. Your best bet here is to tap into collective intelligence, or crowdsourcing. That implies, you have give people greater level of autonomy, and allow them to experiment with ideas. Here, it is important to connect a diverse group of people and get them to talk to each other – because the innovators may not know how to apply their innovation to the business context (remember that it was Steve Jobs who brought Xerox Palo Alto’s innovation in Graphic User Interface (GUI) into the business world). Thus, the “Crowdsourcing” type of KM is about cultivating communities, holding quality conversations, analysing business intelligence, and rapid prototyping.

Further Readings:

http://www.mof.gov.sg/budget_2010/speech_toc/pc.html

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/1037480/1/.html

http://www.iras.gov.sg/irashome/PIcredit.aspx

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/1039050/1/.html