I once heard that knowledge sharing is the opposite of sharing a cake. Once you come to the table and share it, you don’t walk away with less knowledge and in fact, you can walk away with more knowledge. Knowledge sharing sounds pretty mundane. It is simple. It doesn’t sparkle or shine but it is essential for innovative teams to figure out how to do it well. There are all kinds of technologies and tools available to support knowledge sharing but at the end of the day, the commitment to share knowledge has to be part of your culture.

Social media has done a lot to move us into information sharing mode but it can still be somewhat haphazard. (I don’t need to see a picture of what you ate last night at a fancy restaurant but I probably do need to know that you just ran into a technical issue that is impacting my client’s project.) And keep in mind: Knowledge has an expiration date on it so it is important to be aware of the temporal aspects as well.