ISMICK 2006: back from South Africa

Yesterday my colleague Marloes and I came back from our trip to South Africa.

The first week we travelled around. An impressive experience in a beautiful country with great people.

The last three days we visited the ISMICK conference: International Symposium on the Mangement of Industrial and Corporate Knowledge. Read a small report on  the conference on the website of the university of Stellenbosch. This year’s theme was knowledge productivity but unfortunately the contributions were more focused on the management of knowledge than on knowledge productivity. However, we met some great people and saw some good presentations. Among others the presentation of Niels Faber was very interesting. His paper ‘Knowledge and knowledge use for sustainable innovation, the case of starch potato production; achieving more with less’ is attached to this post. He has done an extensive research on the way potato-farmers use a certain decision support system. His conclusions comprise:

• The various farmers use different sources of information. This has implications for the manner of communicating with the farmers. High-yielding farmers use decision support systems, the Internet, and study groups and other social sources of information.
• The authors believe that the absence of farmers adopting decision support systems for their growth-related decision is caused by the lack of user involvement during design.
• The translation from scientific research into user- or farmer-oriented decision support systems was hampered. During design, end-users, i.e. farmers, had not been questioned about their needs and requirements. And because we found that there is not one large group of similar farmers, but various types of farmers, we can conclude that one design for all farmers would not have been enough.