Knowledge Maturing and the Participatory Enterprise

Introduction The agility of organizations has become the critical success factor for competitiveness in a world characterized by an accelerating rate of change. Agility requires that companies and their employees together and mutually dependently learn and develop their competencies efficiently in order to improve productivity of knowledge work. As a reaction to failures of organisation‐driven approaches to technology‐enhanced learning and the success of community‐driven approaches in the spirit of Web 2.0, we have recently seen a paradigm shift in technology support for learning towards more participatory approaches in which learners are seen as active contributors. Within enterprises, this new perspective brings together traditionally separated disciplines like e‐ learning, knowledge management, and human resources development, but also requires a fundamental change of the culture of the respective enterprise towards an enterprise 2.0, which is characterized by enhanced collaboration and a cultural of employee participation. To that end, we first need to rethink our understanding of learning and broaden our perspective particularly towards informal learning activities. Here, the knowledge maturing model [Schmidt, 2005; Maier & Schmidt, 2007] provides a promising starting point, aimed at unifying knowledge management and e‐learning approaches. Within organizations, we further need to consider the implications of a new understanding of individual and organizational learning for the corporate culture and the role of IT tools in that change process.