Managing knowledge networks (KN) within organizations has taken on enhanced importance in recent years because of the decline of middle management and other changes in formal organizational structures, the growth of information technologies, and our increasingly competitive global economy. KN can be manifested in a variety of forms: project teams, research groups, advice networks, professional communities, communities of practice, support groups, and so on. Individuals increasingly find that they must determine for themselves what choices they will make, distilling the information they have gathered in their personal networks to knowledge that results in strategies they can pursue as they act in an ever more complex world. The awareness of the operation of KN is, quite literally, an important survival tool for individuals. In turn, resulting individual learning and actions determine how organizations adapt to rapidly changing environments and innovate to meet new challenges.

I have been conducting network analysis, innovation, and information research for over three decades now (Susskind et al. 2005). This book represents a culmination of this work: a bringing together of what have been complementary, although separate, strands of research. As such it draws on my books and research articles in these diverse areas, hopefully resulting in a useful synthesis of ideas applied to the increasingly critical problem of understanding the role of KN in contemporary organizations. My first book, Organizational Communication Structure, placed network analysis within broader intellectual traditions relating it directly to formal, spatial, and cultural approaches to structure. Information Seeking: An Organizational Dilemma applied many of these structural approaches to the problems individuals confront when they seek information in organizations. It also explored the darker sides of individual action that I will discuss later in this work. My most recent work, Innovation and Knowledge Management: The Cancer Information Service Research Consortium, draws on my work on innovations, and my more recent interest in knowledge management, to analyze an elaborate case study of how these themes unfolded in a major provider of health information to the general public.