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Fast expert teams- a new digital model for organizing expertise quickly to solve complex problems - wins second place in the European competition for Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital Excellence Awards

One of the competition judges, Dr. Sandra Moffett, Professor for Business Analytics and Head of Ulster University Business School, Magee Campus, tells that the quality of the initiatives was exceptionally high. From a substantial number of Expression of Interest submissions, 20 were invited to submit a whole case history, and out of these, 9 were invited to present at the European Conference on Knowledge Management, held in Naples, Italy.

Finalists from nine countries were of very high quality and very different from each other, including The MySLR platform digitalizing systematic literature reviews, a system for tracking ventures built by Boston Consulting Group Digital Ventures, and a digital system for combating Mafia control in Italy.
The first award was given to Julia Parnaby and Anne-Maria Hall’s knowledge management initiative in curating and sharing evidence on the societal impact of the National Lottery Community Fund in UK, funding 14.000 projects with 5.2 million people and 290.000 volunteers each year.
The second award was presented to Kirsimarja Blomqvist from LUT University Business School, presenting a digital mode of organizing dispersed and specialized knowledge quickly for solving complex problems. Instead of traditional organizations, the Fast expert teams model leverages digital platforms, temporary communities, teams, and trust for fast temporary organizing for each task.
Recipients of the third award were Andy Kiendl, Padma Sai Prasad, and Tomer Shoshan initiative at NetApp, a California-based global software company knowledge management initiative for remarkable improvement in their customer end employee experience.
Kirsimarja Blomqvist says that Fast expert teams – a digital mode of organizing expertise quickly to solve complex problems – has been developed in research projects, teaching and societal initiatives. It was recognized also by OECD as Finland’s initiative in the Covid-19 crisis and the WORK2030 program developing Finnish working life sees it as social innovation. Kirsimarja Blomqvist has written also a workbook freely available in Finnish and English online for anyone interested in participating, leading, or acting as a client for complex problems to be solved.

Fast expert teams are a temporary cross-boundary collaboration where multimodal asynchronous digital communication is used for fast and flexible knowledge co-creation. It leverages expertise from diverse networks to compose task-specific expert teams that collaborate to solve complex problems. The malleable digital organizing structure can be easily scaled from one expert team to a meta-team community structure with several teams embedded in a temporary digital community. It can be seen as a multi-purpose organizing technology that different organizations can apply for different complex tasks requiring specialized and dispersed expertise. It contributes to research and practice in knowledge management by illustrating how diverse and dispersed knowledge can be organized to co-create new knowledge in digital platforms.
Kirsimarja Blomqvist
Professor for Knowledge management, LUT University Business School

+358 40 755 1693