I realized that few people outside individual projects really follow the progress of other research projects. As companies grow and as the amount of information generated increases, fewer people have time to read the literature or are able to personally interact with those outside their particular program. This results in isolated projects, the inability to stay current, and the repetition of effort. Information flow stagnates, knowledge is only fitfully created and poor decisions get made due to lack of knowledge.

The following report looks at research describing how knowledge is created from information. A unifying principle in much of the work is that people must interact to create knowledge. Simply examining a database can not do it. Information must be dispersed in order for knowledge to be created. A company has some hope, then, if it can create an environment that fosters personal interaction. This is easy in small companies but becomes much harder as they increase in size. Luckily, technology may help attack this problem, providing a way for people to interact much more efficiently, allowing much larger groups of people to come together to create knowledge.