Organisations which want to increase knowledge collaboration within the organisation and outside of it should pay attention to the intellectual property value of the information, both from their perspective and from the point of view of their clients, said Mr Ashok Soota, Executive Chairman, Happiest Minds.
Discussing the CII's upcoming two-day knowledge summit that starts on January 31 here, Mr Soota, who is also the Chairman of the CII Knowledge Council, said that there is a fine line between the loss of intellectual property and the importance of intellectual property (IP). “You should understand the importance of your own IP and the IP of the customers,” he said.
There are times when information should not be shared, said Mr Soota and gave the example of a company like Apple, which has severe competition with other companies in the tablet and mobile business.
“Such companies make around 60-70 per cent of their profits in the first two to three months after launch, after which the prices drop,” he said.
But this apart, Mr Soota advised companies in the IT services business to look at knowledge sharing because it established thought leadership.
Looking at the open source effort as a global knowledge community, he said that collaboration enhanced productivity. Touching upon the themes of happiness, after which his company is named, he said that collaboration and knowledge management led to successful entrepreneurship, which in turn led to happiness.
“Another way of looking at it is to visualise knowledge management and collaboration leading to successful entrepreneurship, with happiness becoming the icing on the cake.”
Social media could also be used to leverage knowledge sharing, said Mr Soota. Commenting upon the recent phenomenon of social media fatigue, he said that the positives are always evident and are useful for forming partnerships or getting employment. “But there is also a lot of chatter, which is invading the work space. The question is about how you sift that out.”
Keywords: Ashok Soota, Executive Chairman, Happiest Minds, knowledge summit
