Wellsprings Of Knowledge

"Wellsprings of Knowledge" by Dorothy Leonard-Barton

Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation by Dorothy Leonard-Barton (334 pages, Harvard Business School Press, 1995)

by Barbara Presley Noble

Dorothy Leonard-Barton warns readers upfront that her new book, Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation, is not a quick read. Indeed it is not, though the author, a Harvard Business School professor, tries hard to soften a knot of strategy research with true-life examples from several technology companies. Unfortunately, business books tend to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger movies: the special effects and twists are a lot more important than the basic plot, which doesn't change much.

Ms. Leonard-Barton provides a valuable survey of innovation and the barriers to innovation. In the process, she raises some perennial issues—why do designers make things without consulting their target users?—but does not significantly advance our understanding of them.

A variety of players, from Robert Reich to Newt Gingrich, have recently observed that epistemological skills are more important than technical skills, that is, that it's more important to know how to learn than to acquire particular, inevitably obsolete vocational skills.

Wellsprings of Knowledge is very à la mode in raising this attitude to an institutional level. The author views companies as sites of learning and information transfer rather than as physical or financial entities. The workforce of a forward-looking company must be able to process and manipulate knowledge as well as perform particular skills. Top management must encourage creative chaos, cross-fertilization among disciplines within the company and benchmarking with competitors. Those companies that are most enthusiastic about pursuing knowledge are those most likely to harness the power of innovation.

Because of the investment required in plants and research and development, innovation at technology companies is a high-stakes process. Consumer companies might be able to afford to miscalculate the public's desire for, say, a new and improved dish soap, but a company that chooses the wrong direction in technology, fails to keep current or responds too conservatively to obvious changes on the horizon is likely to end up expensively dead in the water.

Its core competencies, cultivated and embroidered upon, Ms. Leonard-Barton writes, are a technology company's competitive advantage. The trick for the company is to know when its core competencies become core rigidities. Several companies, like I.B.M., come in for criticism for growing too large and self-satisfied or too timid to know they would soon be in the soup. NCR, confronted with what now seems like the obvious complementarity of cash register and computer technology,

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