The knowledge: Manfred Bornemann
- Article 2 of 3
- IK Magazine, September 2007
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When writing a profile of someone, it’s always a good idea to start by trying to sum up the subject in a few words. Sometimes this can be hard. Sometimes it can be easy. However, knowledge management practitioner, researcher and academic Manfred Bornemann handed his summary to us on a plate when we were arranging a time in his busy schedule for us to speak to him. “Let’s try Wednesday,” he wrote. “Depending on the weather forecast, I might decide on short notice to climb a mountain.”
That does, indeed, give you a flavour of the man: Manfred Bornemann, ?��Ǩ��knowledge nomad’, ready to climb a mountain at short notice.
Certainly, ?��Ǩ��mountain’ would be a good way to describe Bornemann’s curriculum vitae (CV). Despite being just 34 years old, Bornemann has written numerous books and articles for journals; he teaches at universities around the world; he’s founded various knowledge management (KM) organisations and sits on the advisory boards and committees of many journals and events; he’s founded several companies, including his own consultancy; he’s implemented and managed multiple applied research projects and developed important intellectual capital reporting methodologies; and ?��Ǩ��� oh yes ?��Ǩ��� he is a member of the illustrious Entovation 100 global alliance of KM professionals.
It’s not surprising that he has many fans, including intellectual-capital guru Leif Edvinsson and Entovation’s founder, Debra Amidon, who describes herself as “an ardent admirer of him and his work”.
Yet Bornemann became a knowledge management (KM) practitioner almost by accident. Born in Wagna, Austria, he studied economics as an undergraduate at the Karl Franzens University Graz in his home country, before visiting Harvard for a summer school in international management and going on to attain an MSc in social and business sciences. While looking for a thesis for his doctorate, he came across the idea of intellectual capital.
“It’s a story of laziness,” he confesses. “When I was a student in Graz University, I was busy with two subjects: business administration and I was also in law school. I’d heard of intellectual capital and I thought intellectual assets and intellectual capital were the same as patenting, which was a big subject back then in law school. I thought I could do a joint thesis and cover two subjects with one big project.”
Despite discovering his mistake a few weeks later, he started working with Professors Ante Pulic and Ursula Schneider on researching how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the surrounding region of Austria used intellectual capital. He also began to develop a ?��Ǩ��social club’ among PhD students at affiliated universities that shared information about literature. After completing his thesis in 1998, and with a global network of contacts built up from numerous worldwide conferences, he decided to become a KM consultant.
“The keystone of my personal career was my meeting with Gunter Koch,” says Bornemann. Koch was the managing director of the Austrian Research Centers Seibersdorf, the largest applied research centre in Austria. A public-private partnership, it was also a not-for-profit organisation, but investors still wanted to know where their money was going.
“His answer was, ?��Ǩ��We can show you with our intellectual-capital statement what we are doing’.” He asked Bornemann and others to develop the tools and methodologies necessary to develop that statement. “We stole from Danish guidelines, Australian experiences, Canadian and US approaches. But we learnt that the monetary approaches weren’t suitable for us. So we took all those ingredients to create a new method of intellectual capital reporting for research companies.”
Together with another colleague, he then transferred the techniques to industry, which led him to the field of system dynamics. “The next step was quite obvious: we wanted to show relationships, so system dynamics became part of our tools.” Using system dynamics, Bornemann and others were able to create a toolkit for SMEs that wanted to report on their intellectual capital and to see how change might affect it.
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