Projekt ROCKET

Roadmap to Communicating Knowledge Essential for the indusTrial environment

Rocket will prepare a strategic roadmap for future developments in organisational learning relevant to the education of engineers and knowledge workers.

We identify the following developments as the key challenges within this domain:

How to link knowledge management (KM) at the level of an organisation, with KM and E-Learning at the level of people working within an organisation or moving between organisations, so that knowledge that is new to someone can be captured and shared more readily and so that people can cope better with changes in their working life and their environment (including new colleagues, ever-changing tasks and processes, certification requirements, etc.);

How to prepare organisations to monitor the fit between the external environment and their capabilities, their knowledge base, their performance and general competitiveness, in ways that enable them to learn more rapidly, cope more readily with change and generally perform better;

How (for example, through the use of simulations) to build capability in distributed co-operation in various environments, both for organisations and for individuals. Leading to:

How to prepare engineering students, engineers and knowledge workers for work in organisations that are more dynamic (responsive) than today, including virtual organisations comprising distributed networks of small, medium or large organisations, brought together on a project-by-project basis or to participate on a longer-term basis in a supply chain.

In order to stay competitive in a rapidly changing technological environment, organisations must either continually find new staff to replace their outdated staff (usually both infeasible and unacceptable to society) or they must ensure that their current staff are able to meet the demands of the new environment. Pioneering organisations are exploring various ways to achieve the latter. These include:

Providing some form of "knowledge network" containing accessible forms of the organisation's knowledge.

Providing "just-in-time" education or training that supports "active learning" in a realistic context, to allow them to update their knowledge.

Using "knowledge augmentation tools", which capture the expertise of certain staff in ways that allow less-qualified staff to perform as if they had high-level skills and insights.