The knowledge: Manfred Bornemann
- Article 2 of 3
- IK Magazine, September 2007
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At the suggestion of Leif Edvinsson, pioneer of the intellectual-capital concept and Inside Knowledge editorial board member, and with a ?������100,000 backing from Berlin’s Ministry for Economic Affairs, Bornemann was able to take this methodology to Germany as a director and consulting partner of consultancy Arbeitskreis Wissensbilanz.
Since 2004, the company has implemented pilot intellectual capital reports for 52 different German SMEs. But the guidelines developed for the project have spread far wider than that. “It’s quite successful right now,” he says. “We have distributed 15,000 hard copies all over Germany, and 30,000 PDF downloads from our server ?��Ǩ��� although we don’t know how many are now circulating because that’s the nature of PDFs.”
This is arguably the biggest success in Bornemann’s career so far, he says. “I’m very proud of my team. We have competencies from a technical background, marketing, psychology. We try to take the best from each discipline and try to come up with the best, most applicable and cheapest options.”
Ironically for someone specialising in intellectual capital and KM, Bornemann admits he doesn’t know how many people are actually using the methodology yet. “We have no real insight into how many companies are doing intellectual-capital reports. We have 150 consultants trained in seminars, but feedback is very slow. Maybe they’re not allowed to talk. Maybe they’re doing nothing, which would be my worst option. Or maybe they’re very busy implementing it in many companies and don’t have time to tell us ?��Ǩ��� that’s my favourite option.”
Knowledge nomad
In between refereeing journals such as The Learning
Organization and Knowledge Management Research and Practice,
and refereeing and organising conferences such as ICKM,
IKNOW, OKLC and APKMC, Bornemann somehow finds
the time to be a scientific advisor for InCaS, the intellectual
capital statement made in Europe, for which he is helping to
develop and implement a guideline for corporate intellectualcapital
statements.
He is also a lecturer at his undergraduate university as well as at universities and business schools in Germany, Australia, Asia and even further afield. And he’s a member and founder of many professional bodies, including the Wissenregion Steiermark in Graz, the Wissensmanagement Forum Graz and the Gesellschaft f?ɬ�r Wissensmanagement in Germany. As if all that weren’t enough for one polymath, as well as KM, Bornemann has also dipped his toe into other waters.
In 1998, having just finished his initial education ?��Ǩ��� and with a baby on the way ?��Ǩ��� he founded his first company to give himself “the freedom and flexibility to make some money”. A self-proclaimed entrepreneur, Bornemann then founded another company to export pumpkin seeds to Japan.
“It was an innovative start-up, but we went bankrupt anyway,” he recalls. He says the experience was a big learning curve for him, not least because of the differences between investing his own money and working with others’. At the very least, he’ll wait for repeat customers to re-order before stocking large numbers of easily degradable pumpkin seeds again ?��Ǩ��� unlikely though it is that that will arise in his consultancy work.
Bornemann is clear that KM is a methodology not a software product. “I was very conservative and even negative on that topic for a few years. I think people would like to rely on tools: it gives them a feeling of security and developed structure they can build on. We did a tool for intellectual-capital reporting but, essentially, KM is a topic of people,” he says.
As a practice, knowledge management needs to be implemented by general management, he adds, and should therefore improve the profitability of a company. “It’s not about meeting in a coffee bar, it’s not about databases, it’s about creating value based on the intellectual capital of an organisation. If we repeat the abusive use of the concept of KM by software companies of a few years ago, where they were just selling software and not providing support and education about how to use it, then KM will be no topic in a few years from now.”
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