Their troubleshooting sessions became their learning zone where they constructed their narratives and co-produced their insights. They then shared their learning through storytelling.

One of the premises was that this was operated as a closed system where management was not allowed to listen in to conver­sations since trust "was a key issue. In their social community, service engineers trusted one another and felt free to share their knowledge. Sharing this experience-based knowledge became part of their professional lives. The social fabric they created in their work supported knowledge sharing and learning.

Xerox recognized the need for the Eureka experiment to go beyond the conventional IT knowledge capture approach, where a classical management information system is set up around the authorized work practices of organizations to support them. In Eureka, Xerox saw that practice structures were emerging within the work of the organization. Rather than formally wire these emerging work practices, Xerox found that its intranet was ideal for supporting informally developing knowledge practice commu­nities.

Overtime, practice "tips" were shared over the intranet among service engineers all over the world. These practitioners send in their "tips" to their community of practice, which are peer reviewed and warranted by colleagues. The rated "tips" are then incorporated in the knowledge base which is globally available to coIleagues.The service engineers hayeportablelaptops, electronic manuals, and the ability to diagnose problems on a remote basis. Using their knowledge base, they can quickly identify existing solu­tions or create new ones that can be shared "with their community in real time.

Eureka, "ultimately, is an electronic version of "war stories told around the "water cooler-with the added benefits of a user-friendly search engine, an institutional memory, expert validation, and corporate wide ayailability."3

The knowledge sharing that took place in Eureka had significant business results. Over the two-and-a-half-year period of testing and field deployment the outcomes were:
» a 300% learning curve improvement;
» a 10% reduction in service time and parts used;
» fewer lengthy or disrupted customer service calls; and
» increased customer satisfaction.
Eureka, created a virtuous circle, where social capital was formed simultaneously with the creation of intellectual capital and both were leveraged electronically over the Xerox intranet.

LEARNING POINTS

s> The e-dirnension wraps around globalization, computerization, economic disintermediation, and intangiblization and moves things to warp speed.
» Costs of production drop radically as the Internet allows know­ledge to be distributed and assembled anywhere, at anytime, by anyone.
a Distinctions between goods and services diminish as they are infused with electronically enabled knowledge inputs.
* Collaboration plus an effective e-technology infrastructure are necessary ingredients to optimally leverage intellectual capital.
> The e-dimension underfnines just-in-case training and replaces it with just-in-time learning.
» People now own the means of production (in their heads) and can easily take their knowledge capital from one organization to another via the Internet.

NOTES

1. Stewart, T.A. (1997) Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Orga­nizations. Doubleday, New York, p. 7.

2. The Open University (1998) Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Nations. The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.

3. Botldn, J. (1999) Smart Business: How Knowledge Communities Can Revolutionize Your Company. Free Press, New York, p. 218.

Hie Global Dimension

The world is going through a new era of globalism which changes the rules of how business operates. Chapter 5 reviews the nature of the new globalism and the implications for the creating, marketing, and protection of intellectual capital around the world: the new globalism the death of distance: a 24-hour connected world preparing for the new globalism knowledge: a global product protecting intellectual property in a borderless world changing to confront the global threat case study: Buckman Laboratories.

"The geography of the networked knowledge economy places Germany closer to USA than to France, UK closer to Australia and Hong Kong than Spain."

A New Geography of Trade: Implications of Networked Economy Distances, European Telework Development (ETD)

THE NEW GLOBALISM

According to Thomas Friedman, author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the current era of globalization began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989- After incubating for about 20 years, the multiple, unstoppable democratizations in finance, technology, and communication came together to bring such pressure on large, immobile institutions and even nations, that the walls of protection no longerheldup.The demise of the Berlin Wall was the most obvious, but major corporations such as General Motors, IBM, and even countries like Russia, Brazil, and Malaysia began to experience similar upheavals.

What blew away all the walls were three fundamental changes -changes in how we communicate, how we invest, and how we learn about the world. These changes were born and incubated during the Cold War and achieved a critical mass by the late 1980s, when they finally came together into a whirlwind strong enough to blow down all the walls of the Cold War system and enable the world to come together as a single, integrated, open plain. Today, that plain grows wider, faster, and more open every day, as more walls get blown down and more countries get absorbed. And that's why today there is no more First World, Second World, or Third World. There's now just the Fast World - the world of the wide-open plain - and the Slow World - the world of those who either fall by the wayside or choose to live away from the plain in some artificially walled-off valley of their own, because they find the Fast World to be too fast, too scary, too homogenizing, or too demanding.1

With the "democratization of finance," anything and everything became financially tradable. In 1995 David Bowie floated $55mn of bonds secured by revenues from 300 of his recordings. More broadly, in 1999, Reliance Insurance started offering insurance policies on a company's earnings, packaging and managing risk. For example:

Times Mirror Newspapers is in a business of selling advertising and selling newspapers, but at the mercy of a particular variable, the price of newsprint that it does not control at all. Reliance said 'We'll insure you. We'll buy that risk from you and take the volatility out of your earnings, and it will be worth your while on the theory that less volatile earnings are valued more highly by the marketplace. So yes, you'll cost yourself some earnings with an insurance policy but gain market capitalization by reducing your volatility.' ... They made it known they're willing to write much more complex policies in which they take on all of the risks that you don't control because they're in the business of buying, managing, and understanding risks."2

The result of this increasingly universal acceptance of risk is that indi­viduals, enterprises, and even countries are more capable of marketing their intangible assets in a global market.

The democratization of technology allowed the average person to participate in this global market with a click of a mouse and an account at a discountbroker. Thirdly, the democratization of information made the knowledge of specialists available anywhere, anytime, to anyone. Information has moved onto the World Wide Web and is becoming instantly available at very little to no cost.

Intellectual capital is future wealth. It is the capacities that are transformed into marketable offerings. Intellectual capital is now not only increasingly the primary ingredient in goods and services, it is also particularly adaptable to the Internet and current global era. It is weightless, non-dimensional wealth that is an instantaneously transmittable, and globally viable, type of resource. With the availability of the global Internet network, software engineers in India, Poland, and Russia are contracted to provide their intellectual capital to the major IT enterprises throughout the world. Their work may be local but it is instantaneously global in nature. John Naisbitt has described this as the Global Paradox, where "the larger system [is] in service of the smallest player."3