A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.2.A

Looking for disability-related services and organizations near you? No need to fret or look any further. UCP has compiled a “comprehensive, one-stop shop of resources for every U.S. state and territory.” IT'S DONE ALL THE FILTERING FOR YOU. No need to worry about quality or quantity, either. UCP’s “knowledge of disability issues has been accruing for more than sixty years.” It's a source you can trust.

Accruing means adding. Accumulating. Stockpiling. Stockpiling knowledge in this case. Which leads us to KNOWLEDGE STOCKS.

John Seely Brown defines 'em as “what we know at any particular time.” Knowledge stocks are embedded in – maybe I should say they reveal themselves in the forms of – things like product or service offerings, proprietary technologies, and unique insights into how to organize production or marketing activities.*

The State Resource Guides I alluded to above are products of UCP’s Public Education and Outreach (PE&O) wing. As such, I think it’s fair to deduce that PE&O is organized – at least in  part – to “protect and capitalize on existing stocks of knowledge.” My questions, then: 

In what other ways is UCP organized to do this? (i.e., protect and capitalize...) What else does UCP know now that it's banking on being able to use to generate value going forward? 

I’m going to throw some things out in the next post that I think could reasonably be called UCP knowledge stocks. An exercise in classification it'll be.

To what end? 

Making what UCP knows more explicit may help to signal where to look for new opportunities, where to look to innovate, where new approaches may be in order...

A ways down the road.


*I think of Michael Porter’s value chain definition: a chain of activities that a firm operating in a specific industry performs in order to deliver something valuable (product or service)