Section 1: Fundamental Aspects of Knowledge and Knowledge Management

This first section consists of four chapters: "Knowledge Economy for the Innovative Organization" by Wickramasinghe, "Managing Knowledge for Enhancing the Participants through Organizational Learning and Leadership" by Saito, "Permitting the True Potential of Knowledge Assets to be Utilized with KMI" by Wickramasinghe, and "Normal Science and Post-Normal Sciences" by Geisler.

Together these four chapters outline fundamental considerations regarding critical aspects of the knowledge construct (i.e., the dualities found within the knowledge construct as discussed in Chapter 1 and the connection between knowledge management, organizational learning, and leadership as discussed in Chapter 2). Chapter 3 discusses the fundamental components necessary to develop an appropriate and robust knowledge management infrastructure (KMI) and finally Chapter 4 presents important implications and considerations for methodologies for knowledge management that can only be fully appreciated through the understanding of significant aspects of normal and post-normal sciences.

Knowledge management is a nascent evolving field. Our goal in this section is to provide readers with the essential core elements of the KM discipline so that they have a solid foundation, exposure, and understanding of the key concepts. Given that the primary focus of this book is the use of KM for redesigning healthcare operations, we naturally focus our attention on those key aspects of KM that we believe are most beneficial when applied to any/all healthcare scenarios. Specifically, it is necessary to understand the roles for people and technology as well as how to develop appropriate and solid KM infrastructures so that the true potential of all knowledge assets can be maximized. This in turn requires appropriate leadership, good metrics, and a need to break away from rigid and outdated structures and/or archaic approaches to viewing problems and scenarios.

On the completion of this section, the reader should have a solid grounding in the fundamental core principles that are necessary in order to understand the role for knowledge management in redesigning innovative healthcare processes.