Collective intelligence-based resource allocation to optimise knowledge and innovation harnessing in corporate environments

A typical problem that large enterprises face is how to effectively harness the intangible knowledge, expertise, skills and lessons learnt of their staff members. Intangible knowledge harnessing and its codification into usable document formats are vital for the enterprise since they directly affect its ability to innovate and solve complex new problems. However, the identification of the individuals whose contribution can solve each knowledge-demanding problem may be difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism that uses the collective intelligence of the corporate crowd to identify the tacit knowledge competencies of each employee and coordinate their contributions, inside a wiki-like system, so that each individual may contribute in the most efficient way. Experimental results show that, compared to the fully self-coordinated pattern used by current collaborative knowledge harnessing approaches, the proposed mechanism can help the corporate community allocate its intangible skill resources more efficiently, and thus produce more qualitative knowledge in a timelier manner.