Some organizations are applying open-source thinking to improve a range of core business processes. Aided by rapidly changing technology, these leaders are looking outside the gates to develop faster and better solutions to a variety of strategic, operational, and organizational problems.

Knowledge brokering is one of the human forces behind knowledge transfer. It’s a dynamic activity that goes well beyond the standard notion of transfer as a collection of activities that helps move information from a source to a recipient. Brokering focuses on identifying and bringing together people interested in an issue, people who can help each other develop evidence-based solutions. It helps build relationships and networks for sharing existing research and ideas and stimulating new work. Knowledge brokering supports evidence-based decision-making by encouraging the connections that ease knowledge transfer.

Like best-practice benchmarking, knowledge brokering aims to find—not invent—world-class answers to problems. But it goes beyond benchmarking and other traditional approaches of where and how companies search for information and how they use it. Here are some practices being taken up by organizations to improve their business processes.

Using Knowledge Brokering

The knowledge brokering approaches being applied to many business processes have the following steps in common:

• Identify the Problems – The first step is to approach the business problem at a level that encourages effective brokering. If the problem is too high level or complex, few potential solvers will have the experience to address it. By considering a problem’s constituent parts, companies increase both the pool of solvers and the odds of good results—much in the way that carefully selecting the terms of a search engine query increases its usefulness.
• Thoroughly Evaluate Brokers – With context-free problems in mind, teams can begin looking for knowledge brokers. The key is casting an appropriately wide net; evaluating at least four to five industries. Teams should pay particular attention to companies or sectors that have experienced the problem recently or where all industry players must excel at addressing it.
• Extract Ideas – The insights good knowledge brokers bring to a problem are conveyed in the personal stories and anecdotes they tell. These stories contain tacit information that is gleaned, often semiconsciously, from experience and is difficult to document and transfer by formal means. Yet tacit knowledge is particularly powerful because it’s rich in the practical dos and don’ts that can help a team implement process changes.
• Implement new Ideas in Action plan- The final step is for the team to incorporate the ideas into an implementation plan for a new process, which doesn’t have to be perfect—just significantly better than the existing one.

Networking is the Key

Knowledge brokering can transform the way companies develop and improve their core business processes. Nevertheless, like other forms of open innovation, it requires considerable change on the part of managers.

Managers at all levels, for example, will increasingly need to become much more conscious of the social networks to which they do and could belong. Gone also are the days when they might simply have leveraged relationships within their own industries. Executives who can cultivate a variety of external networks will be vital to a company’s ability to innovate. Simply being connected, however, is not enough. Managers must be prepared to use their networks and reach out to people they don’t know for help.

New applications of open-innovation principles allow progressive companies to improve not just their products but also their core internal business processes. By tapping into a wide variety of knowledge sources and combining outside insights with internal ones, companies can develop breakthrough process innovations while positioning themselves for a more networked world where whom employees know is as important as what they know.