Knowledge Management: From Brain to Business (PDF 5.5 - Asian ...

and with other units of SCG, we organized a small class. Each class had 12 operators
selected from various units, who were taken out of their work and placed into this class.
They worked with facilitators—we do not call them teachers but facilitators. We first
conducted basic training, after which the operators came up with their own projects and they
started learning, searching for information from the Internet and books. These operators had
basically closed their books after graduation over 10 years ago, books that were only in the
Thai language. Now we asked them to open books that were on advanced topics and in
English. Nevertheless, this group of people did very well because they wanted to learn and
understand the topics. Over the past four to five years, about 60 people have passed the
course and they are working in a much-improved manner.
We are now expanding this program to a larger scale because we have good seeds in place.
We have people attend the program then go back to their units. We are now trying to
organize what we call a “cell system,” whereby those people will try to spread what they
learned into the small units in which they work. We are going to see the results of this in the
next few years.
This kind of environment is an important thing to build together, while at the same time we
try to capture and store the different knowledge. How we can encourage people to learn is a
very important issue. We need to develop together and integrate what we have created into
the business practice, which we call “horizontal learning.” In the past all the learning was
very much focused within very small, closed units, but now we can share the knowledge
horizontally and achieve higher value-added innovation.
Many new things might be developed and we plan to introduce a lot of new products into the
market starting this year. Not only that, we can develop people to be good leaders. The
atmosphere that we would like to have of being open-minded is there.
That ends my presentation about integrating knowledge management and learning for
innovation in SCG. The work is not yet complete; it is ongoing and I think that we still have a
long way to go. I hope that what we have done and what we have tried to share with all of
you will benefit to some extent all of you here.
Thank you very much.
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