Knowledge Management and Sustainability

Knowledge is acquired and mastered through experience.
It becomes readily available for application in various contexts without conscious thought.
Examples include driving a car or riding a bike, where the required actions become automatic.
Knowledge is valuable because it provides context based on past ideas, experiences, places, and people.

Explicit Knowledge:
- Anything that is written down or captured (e.g., in a database, manual, or documentation).
- Syllabus for Cambridge exams.
Tacit Knowledge (Implicit):
- Knowledge gained from experience.
- Contextualizing work experience to provide the best possible way to do a job, including different procedures.
- Utilizing experience to consider different options and choose the best alternative.
- More common among experienced employees.
Passive Knowledge:
- Anyone can have passive knowledge whether you have little experience, medium experience, or lots of years of experience
Institutional Knowledge:
- Know-how of the organization (e.g., unique resources, IT, leadership, management, strategic vision).
- The organization's way of training people, sharing learning experiences, auditing processes, and organizational perspectives.
- Developed through experiences within the company, whether good or bad.
- Establishes practical processes based on the organization's people, activities, products, and services.

Encompasses knowledge creation, transfer, and sharing.
Boosts organizational efficiency by modifying objectives based on employee expertise and organizational operations.
Empowers employees, making them feel valued and contributing to the organization's success.
Facilitates information sharing, knowledge sharing, innovative ideas, and discussion of different practices.
Leads to increased staff retention.
Enhances organizational efficiency and effectiveness.
Helps organizations adapt to different situations.
Incorporating knowledge management alongside human resource management benefits the organization.

Safeguarding Institutional Knowledge:
- Addressing the risk of losing important expertise due to retirement or employee turnover.
- Capturing and transferring information to maintain continuity in sustainability projects using interviews and exit interviews.
- Converting tacit knowledge into manuals or videos.
- Identifying, collecting, organizing, sharing, adapting, and enhancing knowledge.
Facilitating Informed Decision Making:
- Using historical data, compliance records, and optimal environmental practices to improve decision-making.
- Promoting open access to information and transparency to build a knowledge-sharing culture.
- Supporting policy and innovation to reduce risk and build a resilient team.
- Example: IKEA using a centralized system to collect historical data for sustainability goals, track customer feedback, improve products, and enhance stakeholder engagement.
Promoting Innovation and Sustainable Practices:
- Innovation introduces new ideas, concepts, products, and services that improve real skills and respond to challenges.
- Conventional innovation aims to create more profitable products and processes.
- Example 1: Coffee capsule innovation by NextFresso using 80% recycled aluminum.
- Example 2: Transition from paper-based medical records to electronic health record (EHR) systems in hospitals, leading to reduced paper use, costs, and patient waiting times.

Coffee capsule waste: 29,000 plastic capsules discarded every minute as a result of about $40\%$ of coffee drinkers owning one or more coffee machine.
Medical Records:
- Major regional hospitals used about 10-12,000 sheets of paper monthly for patient records.
- Average patient waiting time for file retrieval was 45 minutes per visit (Ministry of Health, Roche, 2019).
  - Patient waiting time dropped to ten minutes for record access after EHR implementation.
Implementing electronic health records:
- Led to $80\%$ reduction in paper use.
  - Cost fell by $30\%$ .

Businesses must remain agile and innovative due to intense demands for sustainability.
Knowledge management enables capturing market intelligence, consumer trends, and regulatory updates.
Supports real-time decision-making, cross-functional learning, and redesigning products/services to meet ESG criteria.
Lux Resorts:
- Uses "Tread Lightly" program for revenue activity and waste reduction.
- Applies quest site knowledge sharing for innovations (e.g., solar energy in Mauritius).
- Environmental retention reporting systems use digital dashboards for environmental performance data.
- Offers employee training and empowerment programs.

Unilever:
- Sustainable Living Plan focuses on data collection on sustainable sourcing, product life cycle impacts, and consumer behaviors.
- Transforms raw data on environmental footprint of raw materials into actionable information.
- Uses explicit knowledge to standardize practices, implicit knowledge to adapt procedures, and institutional knowledge to inspire innovation.
- For Olex and Unilever explicit knowledge can be said to standardize and align practices, implicit knowledge as well which helps you adapt and apply procedures across different results, regional projects as well to innovate and maintain sustainability culture.
Promotes informed decision making.
Exhibiting corporate accountability through transparency and ESG commitment enhances trust and aligns with sustainability targets.