Ignorance Management: the Lessons of Small Enterprises for Knowledge Management

Knowledge management as traditionally espoused has two main strands: dealing with the aggregation of knowledge and the transfer of knowledge. However this official discourse and its key concepts grew out of the experience of large, mature, highly structured and dispersed enterprises. Looking at the environment in which small enterprises work suggests a different set of key concepts, looking at the notions of experience and structural capital as key knowledge manipulation tools. These tools are particularly relevant to environments of high uncertainty, volatility and risk – and so also have a significant contribution to make to the direction of knowledge management for larger enterprises, where adaptiveness and ignorance management tools are becoming increasingly important.