Increasing prosperity through Value Networks

This blog describes the fifth step in the NOBO Vituous Circle. It examines how knowledge workers can increase prosperity through value networks.

"The emerging knowledge economy and networked world of enterprise have the potential for dramatically increasing economic and social prsoperity in a much different way than we have experienced in the past" writes Verna Allee in her book "The Future of Knowledge". Allee asserts that by viewing an enterprise as a value network brings greater understanding of the web of relationships that generate both tangible and intangible value. The bigger the network of knowledge workers...the greater that value is to the knowledge workers themselves.

For NOBO what might this value be? Etienne Wenger in his book "Cultivating Communities of Practice" tables the benefits for individual community members and for the organisation as a whole. Individual long-term benefits include:

• forum for expanding skills and expertise
• network for keeping abreast of a field
• enhanced professional reputation
• increased marketability and employability
• strong sense of professional identity.

Organisation long-term benefits include:

• knowledge-based alliances
• emergence of unplanned capabilities
• capacity to develop new strategic options
• ability to foresee technological developments
• ability to take advantage of emerging market opportunities.

The next blog describes step six of the NOBO Vituous Circle. It considers how knowledge workers in value networks build alliances as a new kind of strategy opportunity.