The Capability to Remain Competent

There are wide-spread methods to measure innovation within organisations, such as patents, number of products per year or turn-over share of new products. These are output-indicators but also outcome-indicators are deployed, such as ROI or growth of employment rate, market share or value. Yet they neither are causal implications directly deducible from those indicators nor do they tell anything about how well companies do in the future as the measures are based on information about the past.

Still, the market continue to speed up and adapting to ever changing markets becomes more important for organisations to stay in business. We find there is a shift towards measuring viability instead in form of innovation abilities and therefore bringing along a change of focus from out- to input factors. The Competence Theory as primary example fully pays tribute to change being a constant force. Solely focussing on input indicators however is an equal limitation as now we find a view of a singled sighted view of adaption qualities being replaced by a singled sighted view of creation qualities.

What these management strategies and views try to measure and control is in effect a meta-capability. It can be described as the capability to remain competent and so face and work with whatever changes there will be. In other words the capability to persistently disposition self-organising knowledge is vital for organisations nowadays. This does not mean that all knowledge and skills have to be owned. It does not even mean that any of the knowledge and skills needs to be owned but those that are needed for locating knowledge and learning to put it into context.

This raises following questions: (a) Which tools do best support self-organising knowledge? (b) How do we control the disposition? (c) What are sound observation criteria to measure the process

As my dissertation progresses, I will try to find some answers.