Let’s take the analogy of ideas being currency. Like the 20p piece in your pocket, they represent value but it’s a value that is only realised when you actually spend it. Why does this matter? Because we’re losing or throwing away scores of ideas on a daily basis.
Ideas are more likely to be implemented when multiple dynamic factors, including information, resource and support markets provide conducive conditions (Kanter). Until this occurs, however, the entrepreneur must store their ideas for possible future implementation; create their own ‘back catalogue’ of ideas.
This ongoing storage means all ideas are current. There is not a linear model where ideas are originated, considered and either implemented or exterminated. Rather, as one entrepreneur phrased it, “lots and lots of ideas swim around, they disappear, they resurface.” Multiple ideas are formed over time, and each one goes through peaks and troughs in levels of interest or activity by the entrepreneur. Yet at any one point in time, the entrepreneur is able to scan the entire range, and see multiple ideas at various priority or interest levels. When conditions become conducive to implementation, the entrepreneur can proceed with acting on the idea.
MANAGEMENT and legacy
The majority of institutions and creative individuals do not actively manage and store their intellectual assets, their ideas. These usually consist of tacit rather than explicit knowledge, with no record kept of unrealised ideas, except in people’s heads – they therefore leave the organisation with the person, or even die with them.
The dynamic structures of the culture and creative sectors make knowledge management even more pressing. Project-focussed or transient groups of individuals, and constant evolutions in which businesses are dissolved and reinvented to focus on new niche markets, means that information is even more likely to be tacit. Tacit knowledge is unwritten and hard to articulate: “It is often learned by osmosis, over long periods, in very particular contexts… Tacit knowledge is robust and often intuitive, habitual and reflexive.” (Leadbeater) Gupta defines it, “Knowledge that enters into the production of behaviours and/or the constitution of mental states but is not ordinarily accessible to consciousness.”
In other words, cultural entrepreneurs (and ‘entrepreneurial’ individuals within culture institutions charged with delivering commercial income) often work without possessing a theory of their work; they just ‘perform’ it. This reflects the suggestion that the focus of many cultural entrepreneurs is on short-term, ‘operational’ priorities, rather than longer-term, ‘strategic’ priorities. The significance of long term knowledge management has therefore not been realised.
Codifying knowledge: the ‘ideas book’
Intangible and unrealised ideas could potentially survive longer than the tangible business or professional career of the individual entrepreneur, and so must be carefully managed if their value is ever to be realised. To do this, it must be captured and stored in a form that can be accessed by others or referenced when needed, by conversion into explicit knowledge. This provides the opportunity for knowledge to be owned by the enterprise, rather than just the entrepreneur, and furthermore may be usefully shared among the wider networks in which the enterprise operates.
Codifying knowledge aims to convert knowledge into accessible and applicable formats. This could be as simple as maintaining an ‘ideas book’, providing a useful catalogue of inspiration whilst preserving a legacy of ideas. Even such informal methods of managing intellectual assets must urgently be applied by individuals and institutions – they are familiar, cheap, and less-time consuming than more complex methods, but frequently as effective. Only in this way can the true value of unrealised ideas ever be realised.
