John Hagel on Knowledge: From Stocks to Flows

Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows - A Conversation with John Hagel

Joshua-Michéle Ross speaks with John Hagel, Co-chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge:

"One of the key principles that we have around this notion of a Big Shift in the aggregate is that increasingly we're moving from a world in business where the source of economic value is less and less around stocks of knowledge, what we know at any point in time, and it's shifting much more to the notion of participating effectively in flows of knowledge."

This is the kind of thinking on which I draw from the business world to consider questions related to how libraries might change in the years ahead. In many respects, academic libaries both archive stocks of knowledge and gather flows of knowledge.

But a shift from stocks of knowledge to flows might also suggest a move from traditional guide roles, such as pointing researchers to sources of data, to more active creator roles, such as creating mashups of data as new information sources.