Successful paradigms, execution issues and best practices to build learning organisations

This paper provides an overview of the successful paradigms, execution issues and best practices to harness the power of knowledge residing in an organisation. As businesses and technology lead the transition of society and economy from an industry‐based to information‐oriented age, Knowledge Management (KM) appears as a powerful competitive weapon. This transition demands a change in the way companies harness the power of the knowledge in the organisation. This paper describes and synthesises the concepts and viewpoints related to the drivers of KM, the challenges to managing knowledge in organisations, the factors critical to successfully adopting the KM philosophy in an organisation, how KM can come to be understood as a critical part of a company's competitive strategy and how to deploy a sustainable KM system that suits the business needs of an organisation. Empirical validation of these concepts is based on the author's extensive experience in envisioning and growing knowledge‐based organisations in established global companies and from the interviews conducted by the author with the representatives of several organisations.