Fostering knowledge management through the creative work environment: a portable model from the advertising industry

Abstract

Within the knowledge-creating organisation, building communities of practice and allowing people to form social networks in order to disperse information is critical in order to foster creativity and innovation. It is argued that in order to exploit explicit knowledge and build an effective community of practice, there needs to be a work environment that encourages information sharing, creativity and innovation. The main approach of this research was to explore senior management’s perceptions of the positive and negative factors that foster or hinder the social work environment. A conceptual model designed by Amabile et al. [5] was used as a framework for a series of qualitative interviews with senior managers within the UK advertising industry. This research found that UK advertising agencies are organised in a manner that allows them to strongly reinforce the work dimensions that foster a social/creative work environment and, therefore, effectively utilise explicit knowledge. The factors that usually hinder the creative working environment of an organisation were largely lacking in these agencies. The findings support the argument that this highly creative industry does replicate best practice and can be seen as a benchmark for other organisations. However, it is argued that the advertising industry may be more applicable as a benchmark for other service-based industries and knowledge-based organisations, particularly in the new economy, rather than large production-orientated industries.