Strategic intentions: managing knowledge networks for sustainable development. How to manage a successful knowledge network

Guide written for practitioners who are working with different models of individual and institutional knowledge collaboration. It aims to capture the details of network operations and management: what it really takes to help knowledge networks achieve their potential. Highlighted lessons for networkers include:

• Most knowledge networks are initiated through the efforts of one or two lead organisations. Before bringing a network together, the lead organisation should ask the following questions:
  
  • What is its intention in setting up the network? What policy or practice does the lead organisation want to change?
    
  • Are partners needed to move that change forward, and if so, why? Will they contribute knowledge, or legitimacy, or access to decision-makers, or access to funding?
    
  • What advantage, if any, will the lead organisation lose or gain by not working in a network with others? Will partners water down rather than strengthen its efforts?
    In answering these questions, the lead organisation can begin to define the strategic intentions of the network.
    
• The advantages of network include both joint value creation, capacity strengthening (of both the network and its component parts) and the ability to engage decision-makers more directly.
  
• Networks are complex, institutional relationships that require regular attention to be effective. Organisational management skills are essential for building and maintaining networks. They need decision-making mechanisms among the partners for choosing and approving areas of work, research results, and funding proposals for further work.
  
• Networks require a network manager, someone who is a business process manager.
  
• Communications and engagement strategies are essential. From the beginning, network members must build relationships with those they seek to inform, influence, and work together with for change. The network must constantly look at how it will move its knowledge not just outward to broad audiences, but directly into practice.
  
• More research is needed to develop simple but effective means for evaluating networks. A network needs to be able to determine what changes it has effected through its research and communications work. It needs to monitor whether it is fully realising its potential. This requires evaluation methods that not only assess individual activities, but provide some means for identifying changes as a result of its combination of efforts.

The report includes an experimental framework for network evaluation and also includes a series of working papers:

• Strategic Intentions: Principles for Formal Knowledge Networks.
  
• Dating the Decision Makers: Moving from Communications to Engagement Strategies.
  
• Form Follows Function: Management and Governance of Knowledge Networks.
  
• Helping Knowledge Networks Work.
  
• Hidden Assets: Young Professionals in Knowledge Networks.
  
• Measuring While You Manage.

(from Eldis)