Special issue on GeCSO Conference 2011

Citation

Ribiere, V. and Ermine, J.-L. (2012), "Special issue on GeCSO Conference 2011", VINE, Vol. 42 No. 3/4. https://doi.org/10.1108/vine.2012.28742caa.001

Special issue on GeCSO Conference 2011

Article Type: Guest editorial From: VINE: The journal of information and knowledge management systems, Volume 42, Issue 3/4

About the Guest Editors

Vincent Ribière is the Managing Director and co-founder of the Institute for Knowledge and Innovation Southeast Asia (IKI-SEA). He is the Program Director of the newly created International PhD program in Knowledge and Innovation Management (KIM). He is an Associate Professor at Bangkok University’s Graduate School, where he teaches on a variety of business topics. Previously he has taught at the New York Institute of Technology in New York, and at the American University in Washington DC, as well as holding the position of chairman of the School of Management at the NYIT campus in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Dr Ribière has published more than 50 publications on KM and its application. He has been working on KM for the past ten years. Vincent Ribière is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: vince@vincentribiere.com

Jean-Louis Ermine holds a PhD in fundamental mathematics from the University Denis Diderot in Paris, and a National Research Director Title in computer science from the University of Bordeaux. He worked in the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) as a KM expert for more than ten years. Since 2003, he is professor at the national public organisation “Institut TELECOM” where he is now Director for Innovation at the TELECOM Business School. He has written 4 books and more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He is president of the French Knowledge Management Club since 1999, an association rallying a lot of French speaking companies. He is Expert for UN (UIT, AIEA) since 2003. He is also the president of the French Speaking Congress in Knowledge Management (GeCSO) since 2008. He has been project leader or advisor in numerous research or industrial KM projects in public or private companies in France (Industry, Energy, Transport, Defense, Bank, SMEs . . .) and abroad (Sonatrach (Algeria), Hydro-Que´bec, Public Administration (Canada), IPEN (Brazil). . .).

It is a great pleasure to share with you some of the Knowledge Management research conducted in French-speaking countries. For the past four years, a French-speaking KM congress (GeCSO) has been organised where academics and practitioners present and discuss their ongoing research. Through this special issue of VINE, we wanted to share with you eight selected publications presented during the last congress in Clermont-Ferrand, France (May 2011).

The first paper by C. Paraponaris, J.L. Ermine, P. Lièvre and C. Guittard presents a synthesis of all the publications presented since the creation of the GeCSO congress. After a close study of the 62 papers presented, six main research fields emerged; Knowledge creation from activities, Epistemological foundations of knowledge as knowledge in action, Knowledge as situated action, Knowledge capitalisation, Knowledge modelling using MASK, Epistemic communities and communities of practice. Each theme is presented in details, giving us a good overview of the main KM research trends in French-speaking countries. This first umbrella paper is followed by a publication by B. Le Blanc and J.L. Bouillon which proposes a crossover perspective between knowledge sciences and communication sciences. Both disciplines will strongly benefit from a better integration when it comes to KM. The third article by V. Jacquier-Roux and C. Paraponaris presents a research built around the KM systems’ integration practices required by Multinational Firms (MNFS) internationalizing their Research and Development laboratories. This research is supported by various case studies that lead to interesting findings. The fourth article by Kerstin Kuyken questions the widely used typology of generations (baby-boomer, X, Y, …) and their impact on KM and she proposes a new perspective of “knowledge communities” focusing on knowledge transfer. The fifth publication by C. Godé and P. Barbaroux investigates, through a case study centred on the debriefing of French Air Force Fighters, how organisations can create conditions for individual experiences to develop and, at the same time, capitalize on the latter to improve organisational knowledge and action. By doing so, the authors identify the properties of the learning architecture supporting effective action learning. The next article by M. Gadille and J. Machado reports the evaluation of a method of knowledge transfer in cognitive psychology showing its direct impacts on experts themselves and its indirect effects on groups and on the organisation. The seventh paper by P. Saulais and J.L. Ermine looks at how the knowledge corpus of an organisation can foster its creative and innovation processes. Our last, but not least, publication by Valérie Chanal presents the lessons learned from the experience of a Technological Research Team (TRT) in social science aiming at promoting the development of technical research in universities and with the industry. This paper presents how knowledge was produced through the interaction between social scientists and other practitioners of R&D and innovation.

As you can see, the papers selected cover a large spectrum of KM topics, from individual to organisational, to inter-organisational and to international. Most of them are illustrated and/or supported by real case studies showing the close interaction and integration between KM research and practice. Two of the papers selected also touch on innovation which clearly reflect the general current interest and value that the field of KM can bring to this fast emerging field of innovation management.

We hope you will enjoy this special issue as much as we enjoyed preparing it. Our goal was to give you a taste of the status of KM in French-speaking countries and we hope you will join us at one of the future GeCSO forums!

Merci!

Vincent Ribière, Jean-Louis ErmineGuest Editors