Introduction: In Today’s Competitive And Global Business Environment, Knowledge Is

Introduction: In today’s competitive and global business environment, knowledge is recognized as one of the most important strategic assets for modern Organisations.KM is becoming as essential theme of research into business success as well as a new subject of Business initiatives. There is a growing emphasis on innovation through ‘Knowledge worker’ and ‘Knowledge worker’ and on leveraging of ‘Knowledge Assets’ (Swan et al., 1999). In the competitive world of today, Innovation is the main driver towards growth and prosperity. Innovation is the key to meeting many of today’s development challenges, and the primary force for innovation is fundamental research.[Jones j Alan, 2002]. Knowledge Management can be seen as integrated approach to achieving organizational goals by placing particular focus on knowledge, now considered as the new factor of production. Knowledge Management supports and co-ordinates the creation, transfer and application of individual knowledge in value creation process. This can be realized in a corporate culture that promotes knowledge management, actively support information and documentation process through the systematic application of innovation and quality management tools and methods.

Virgin – The Brand The Virgin group is not a single corporate entity. It is a combination of several holding companies and more than 200 operating companies. The equity owned by the founder Richard Branson, both individually and through a series of family trusts. The linkage between the companies is: the common use of the Virgin trademark, Branson’s role as chairman, and Branson’s management role which is primarily in publicity, public and government relations. The group has more than 200 brands operating in several fields from financial services to railway; from entertainment megastore and cosmetic to space travel. The name Virgin is instantly recognizable and associated with ‘Fun’, ‘Innovative’, ‘Daring’ and ‘Successful’. Virgin Atlantic: The flagship brand of the Virgin group is the Virgin Atlantic. This airline started its operation from year 1984. This company has provided some features that have been the first in the airline industry. It operates long-haul routes between the United Kingdom and North America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia from its main bases at London Heathrow and London. Virgin Atlantic was the first to provide in-flight mingling Information K knowledge Management

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according to the company. These made the customers to be satisfied and also made them to return to the Virgin Atlantic whenever needed.

Virgin Holidays Virgin Holidays is one of the largest and most successful transatlantic tour operator in the world, with holding the position of market leader in the US. It was founded in 1985, and they mainly concentrated on holiday destinations like, USA, Canada, Caribbean, Far East, South Africa, the Middle East, Indian Ocean, Mauritius, New Zealand and Australia.

Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic is one of the several companies under the umbrella brand Virgin. This space line division is based on virgin’s vast experience in aviation, adventure and cutting-edge design combined with the unique technology developed by Burt Bratan. It offers its own privately operated spaceships, modeled on the Spaceship One to offer space travel experience to tourist and affordable exploration of space by human beings. Executive Summary: For a group with more than 200 branded companies operating under a single umbrella brand, each operating independently, the immediate requirement is the coordination between the various companies to help each other with shared values, ideas, interest and goals which give it the competitive advantage. Innovation and pioneering leadership is the key to the success of the virgin group. Virgin stands for value for money or money worth, quality, innovation, fun and a sense of competitive challenge. The hidden value of a company depends on the utilization of knowledge through innovative activities. The group’s mission has been to deliver a quality service by empowering its employees, its facilitates and monitors customer feedback to continually improve the customer's experience through innovation. The mission of the Virgin group’s KM is to bridge the “Know-do gap” through effective application of the specialized knowledge to maintain the growth and remain competitive.

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Strategic Direction: 1. Improving access to the customers information Access of the customer’s information of one brand by with compare the other brand. To fulfill their needs of customer. While helping for the better customer service. 2. Build incrementally on company’s asset, process and partnership. Improve the existing level of co-ordination between the knowledge capital and partnership between the groups of company. 3. Identify the specific instrumental needed for improving the learning and knowledge sharing at the various levels. Identifying the weak point of the business and concentrating to improve the sharing of knowledge at various level of business to improve the business. 4. Creating new business from embedded knowledge They are recognizing the gap in the market for a new product through the exploitation of its existing knowledge in a new way. 5. Fostering and commercializing Innovation They are focusing on establishing a competitive position by increased technological innovation and reduced time to market.

Existing Knowledge Management Situation: Information K knowledge Management

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For a company to excel, there are three areas which are concentrated upon by the company. They are: ➢ Customer Intimacy ➢ Product Leadership ➢ Operational Excellence. Virgin Atlantic:KM Situation Richard Branson was very keen on customer satisfaction. His main concern was the customers needs and to deliver them a high quality of satisfaction with his new innovations. Virgin Atlantics uses many strategies to taste its success. Many innovations were introduced in the company and it was also the first in many issues. The motive is to provide the best service to the customers with their strategies. The company mainly focuses on developing the new ideas and satisfying the customers. The company’s strategy was based on Fostering and Commercializing innovations developed by McKinsey. It was similar to the Knowledge Creation Strategy which was developed by Karl Wiig, 1997 and APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center). The company also focuses on customer needs. The value followed by Virgin Atlantic is Operational Excellence. It also uses Customer-Focused Knowledge Strategy which helped them to understand and provide the customer’s needs. This was also developed by Karl Wigs and APQC. Individual and Group Level: The company not only focuses on specific type of customers. It aims for each and every person who uses airlines to comfort their needs. Because of their strategy and working conditions, they were able to attain high quality and value for money airline. By the end of the 80’s the company was able to serve nearly 1 million people. It also made a turnover of nearly 1.4 billion pounds in the year 2005. The airline also played an important role in the field of bringing up new products in the industry. At present the company has its office in nearly 20 countries and its service covers almost all the important places in the world. The owner Richard Branson also sold his music company to Thorn EMI and invested the money in the Virgin Atlantic. This shows the sincerity to the company and the involvement to serve the People effectively.

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The company also obtained many awards for their service. This also induced to serve more to the people. Some of the awards they received in the year 2004 are “Business travel award ‘Best long haul Business airline; Travel weekly award ‘Best Transatlantic airline; Communicators in Business awards ‘Internal Online Publication-Verb Online’. Organizational level: The strategy of the company is to create new innovations and to provide better facilities to the customers. The knowledge management they used is Knowledge Creation Strategy and to Foster and Commercialize their Innovations. Not only in creations, they are also very keen in fulfilling their customers’ needs. Organization culture: The culture of the company is to maintain a high standard of diligence in producing new innovations by sharing the knowledge even from its competitors. Knowledge creation is at all the stages of the company i.e. from the top management to the managerial level. They share their knowledge to come out with new innovative products but they are also very much adapted for consumer service. Their strategies are the important strength which made them to sustain in the field for a long time in a great position and changed the innovative thoughts to innovations and their growing path into great history. Growth objective: Even though the company comes out with new technologies and ideas, they need to cover up their market position. The innovations they produced are being used in other companies also. Even though they are the first to initiate those products, it is being commonly used now. So they need to think of advance technologies and they have to be implemented with accordance to the customers. They must find their point for success and it has to be developed which improves the company’s growth rapidly. So they need to identify the knowledge which speeds up their growth and researches have to be made to improve tat part. Business Objectives: The airline industry has some specific objectives or goals to be attained. The business objectives of virgin Atlantic are: – To create and commercialize the innovations – Deliver quality service to the customers – Create new facilities based on customers review. Information K knowledge Management

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– Better management of its employees – Environment friendly.

Virgin Holidays: KM Situation Individual Level: The foremost objective for Virgin holiday was giving value added services to its customers. This was one of the reasons for the brand to be so successful. They exceeded the expectation level of the customers visiting their place. Its tie-up with the airlines of the group enabled it to provide special package to them ensuring customer loyalty and effective knowledge sharing among the member groups and operational excellence. The value on which Virgin Holiday was based on was Customer Intimacy.

Group and Organizational Level: Virgin holidays adopted the Customer-Focused Knowledge Strategy for its knowledge management. It dealt with the needs and wants of customer. Virgin Holiday provides everything to customer and satisfied them with their ever improving service. All the facilities like car hire, money exchange and insurance could be attained under a single roof. They attracted their customer by offering discounts on wide range of price beating holiday’s destination package. Virgin holiday tied up with leading hotels, destinations and theme parks in the world. They have their own air ways by collecting low fare to customer December, January and February are the key months for virgin holidays. This is the peak period for virgin holidays as large volume of holidays being booked. It achieved 95 percent of its target in December, 107 percent of its target in January and 132 percent of its target in February, giving an overall performance in relation to target of 114 percent in the last few years. Growth objectives: Virgin holidays try to expand their service to all over world .virgin have been the market leader since 1985. This is because they continue achieving the target regularly by providing better service to the customer. They make the customer feel a lot of good things in the package compared to other competitors. They have improved certain areas likes, booking systems and hospitality which maintains the lead in the sector. Business objectives: The business objective of Virgin holiday can be summarized as: •

Customer satisfaction

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• • •

Improving standard in hygiene and hospitality Lower cost for higher service Providing good experience to the customers

Virgin Galactic:KM Situation Individual and Group Level: The KM strategy adopted by Virgin Galactic are combination of several strategies .The various strategies used for here are the Knowledge Creation strategy which is based on the Boisot’s Information model, Innovation and creation strategy which reflect Treacy’s and Wiersam’s “Product Leadership” strategy which focuses on facilitating knowledge worker sharing and

creating new tacit knowledge which results in a tacit form for the heads. This innovation model makes use of the tacit knowledge whereby which the company has emphasized on innovation and creation of new knowledge through R &D. As a pioneer in offering space travel to tourist, Virgin Galactic had to extensively invest in R &D so it concentrated on product leadership of three values. It entered into a field untested by anyone. Commercializing of space travel was unheard during its entry. Hence the company had to concentrate on developing new ideas and getting them to market. The knowledge and expertise required for this kind of field did not exist .Hence the company could not use the expertise of these agencies. In order to develop a new spacecraft from the scratch required collaboration. This was possible by collaborating with Burt Bratan who provided the expertise on the designing of the craft based on his award winning model “Spaceship One”. This extensive collaborating emphasized on Knowledge sharing between the companies for the design of the craft. This aggressive strategy searched for possible solution with backtracking. Though it was a time consuming and required heuristic approach, having a superior intellectual resource helped the company exploit the traditional resources than its competitors. It combined its learning experience into a critical learning mass around particular strategies. The system life cycle for the KM was Absorption where new insights are applies to a variety of situations producing new experiences. Organization Level: Information K knowledge Management

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Virgin Galactic current organization KM strategy is to provide management with the knowledge for making strategic plan to achieve corporate mission and goals, using business environment developments inputs which impact both the KM technology and KM strategy, and the strategic plan which drives KM strategy, with the objective of achieving corporate objectives. Culture within the Organization The company’s external structure initiatives maintain its innovative core competitive advantage. The core competency of the company is divided into several levels. It engages in knowledge pulling by learning from its collaboration with cooperation partners. Combining the factors of production leads to core competency and core products. Effective Innovation management steers process from knowledge development to commercial exploitation of the results. It has a strong knowledge map of its portfolio, thus enabling to sustain its competitive advantages.

Knowledge Transfer in the Organization Virgin Galactic has done knowledge transfer as it leverages on its distributed intelligence by transferring existing knowledge to other parts of the business. Knowledge is codified in such a way that users can easily use them. This knowledge push and sharing across units is in the form of diffused best practices. Virgin group replicates these best practices across its multiple brands where they are useful to increase the sales volume or customer service. This is adapted from Berger et al. (2009, pp 55). Growth objectives Virgin Galactic needs to produce new products speedily, and gain market acceptance for these products while at the same time secure intellectual property protection for the products in order to sustain its growth objectives and keep away the competitors in the near future. The company needs to continuously identify its knowledge centers which will accelerate the innovation rate. It cross fertilizes ideas so as to increase innovation opportunities as well as stay ahead of the competition.

Business Objective:

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The business objective of Virgin Galactic can be summarized as: ➢ Improving Customers experience through Innovation. ➢ Being Customers champion by delivering to Virgin’s brand value.

➢ Empowering the employees and facilitating and monitoring of customer’s feedback. ➢ Social Responsibility. The above mentioned objectives are achieved by the company through the co-ordination at Individual, Group and Organizational Level. Galactic offers space exploration to tourist at an affordable rates while Virgin Atlantic and Holiday provide better customer service. For this the company had to do extensive R&D to come up with the WhiteknightTwo and Spaceship Two which was result of enhanced collaboration with partners. Individual initiatives

1. Creating a conducive environment for innovation 2. Develop new knowledge to create new product

Group

Organization

Initiatives

initiatives

1. Innovative teams 2. Use of internal and external knowledge initiatives

1. Organization culture to foster innovation

3. Virgin Infrastructure

4. Use of multiple technologies

Identifying new markets for Innovative products and customers desire to experience new things enabled Virgin Galactic to come up with this innovation and were able to forecast demand and supply for the product. The combination of knowledge accessibility and knowledge transformation enabled flow of knowledge through the levels resulting in Innovation learning which forms the tacit knowledge. The company followed its philosophy of being different by building upon its brand value. It delivers on its objectives by empowering its employees to be responsible to simulate ideas generations, initiative and commitment which foster teamwork and entrepreneurial spirit. Information K knowledge Management

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Another of the company’s objective was being Environmental friendly by developing Innovative products which does not cause harm to the environment. Here the company chose to collaborate with its partners to develop a complete carbon composite spacecraft which was cost effective and following the stringent safety requirements for a spacecraft thus satisfying the various business objective of the company.

KM Enablers: Virgin Group has several types of knowledge initiatives within its organization. These enablers help the company I terms of self learning and innovations. The KM enablers are supported by the Information System and the decision support system. Considering the Virgin group as a whole, KM Enablers consists of the following: ➢ Leadership ➢ Culture of the Organization ➢ Technology

As stated earlier, the term Virgin is concerned with the innovation, challenge and success. The culture is of “make work fun”. The employees are given the responsibility and Freedom to simulate idea generation which involves sharing of tacit knowledge among the members, and prevention of knowledge sharing outside the company. Also the company has multiple technologies due to its presence in several sectors. These results in Knowledge creation and capture among the members. The lack of corporate structure in the company enables the employees to feel secure with the orgn enabling them to contribute to the unique culture created by Richard Branson. The company also incorporates the latest technology to design its products like spacecraft. For this purpose the company has expert and intelligence systems to manage the knowledge. Virgin Galactic uses knowledge discovery in knowledge bases to gain insight and ideas from the various other virgin brands. This was the reason for success of Virgin Atlantic and Holiday since they used the customer data effectively. This gives out an outline about the kind of knowledge existing within the company.

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KM Obstacles: Though the brand Virgin is unique in its own way like no other, it has its own implications. There exist no corporate structure within each organization and as a result sometimes there is no proper decision support mechanism to handle the arising problems. There is no control system to overview the entire process too. During decision making the power lies with the founder and group of his sub-ordinates who do not follow any specific mechanism. Hence the decision support cannot provide help in every aspect. All these disablers prevent the organization from effectively utilizing the knowledge management structure and its synergies.

Organizational Structure:

The previous depicted diagram indicates the knowledge flow in an organization like Virgin Galactic. The organization encourages the innovative ideas and view thus contributing to learning which can be related to the Boisot’s Information space model. This continuous learning and open communication creates the Knowledge creation. The capture of knowledge through Information K knowledge Management

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various tools and means is dealt in Knowledge capture .In knowledge development the knowledge is coded and synthesized. In the Knowledge deployment the knowledge is deployed to meet the organizational objectives.

Gap Analysis:

In order to develop a benchmark for gap analysis, organization need to develop a document that assess the overall business strategy. This is done through the Knowledge Audit. Gap analysis is the analysis done in order to find the difference between the current KM situation and the Desired KM situation. It helps us find the gap and analyze the reason for the gap. Firstly the ideal state for the company needs to be recognized for which we need to know the various categories of knowledge existing in the organization. On completing the knowledge audit there are two types of gaps that can be identified: ○ Knowledge gaps: What the organization must know and what the organization knows ○ Strategic gaps: What the organization must do and what the organization can do.

Product Leadership vs fostering an Innovative Environment

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Though both the KM concepts overlap one another with the same kind of meaning, there exists a gap between them. Fostering an Innovative Environment doesn’t always generate innovative ideas which can be implemented in the market immediately .The ideas of the organization are unique but to act upon the idea requires expertise on the field which is hard to find. The company has to rely on its learning process which is always not possible in a competitive world of today. Hence a conducive environment with little disruption needs to exist for becoming a market leader like the Virgin group to market its several products in an effective manner.

Technology, Domain and Organization change vs Competitive pressure and Growth objectives Virgin Galactic as a pioneer in the field of space travel needed to concentrate on meeting its business objective but the company has been rushing to introduce its product to the market due to the increased competition from others like EADS Astrium, XCOR. The company needs to look at market acceptance rather than market introduction to garner market share for which it needs to concentrate on technology and organization change to efficiently capture the share. For this to occur there need to be a re-emphasis on the organizational working style.

Continuous knowledge improvement vs continuously Expanding Knowledge Virgin Galactic has an aggressive approach to expand the knowledge continuously through accessibility and reuse. But the implication is that what works out in one field does not succeed in another field. So the company needs to continue improvement of knowledge which is a continuous and sequential process even though it is a time consuming process. Improvement is Information K knowledge Management

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something which takes time but advantages as it goes on in the long run. Continuous knowledge improvement is very essential for a company to retain its competitive advantages.

Exchange of knowledge across various business functional areas vs Distribution of Knowledge to other parts of organization Virgin Galactic, as a pioneer in the field of space travel needs to cultivate knowledge of its ideas by retaining the knowledge within the organization. The company utilizes the acquired knowledge and distributes to the other brands. But since the Galactic depends on it personalized expert, for this reason it need to concentrate on the recoding of the existing knowledge.The problem lies in the non usage of the tacit knowledge since knowledge base of space travel is of no use to other brands. Only relevant information like customer database could be used by the other brands.

Collaborative Technology System vs Expertise System Virgin Galactic has an expertise system to overview the entire business process. Though the system is in its early stage one of the problem which the company could later face is the too much reliance on the system since it does not guarantee long term alliance or sharing of information to its competitors. The expertise system needs to be explicitly share its knowledge with the other system to enable the knowledge flow between the different systems. The knowledge dissemination needs to be looked into at all aspects.

Knowledge Environment vs Innovative Environment

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The emphasis for growth in Virgin Galactic has been by fostering an Innovative Environment where creative ideas and views are taken into account. But due to strong concentration on innovation, there sometimes is no knowledge activity occurring between the various levels. Also evaluation tools for understanding the knowledge are unavailable due to the management non focus.

Recommendation:

With several gaps existing between the existing KM situation and the ideal KM situation, the management needs to look into minimizing the KM obstacles through various corrective measures or the flow of knowledge among the organization will be lost through the various levels. Here are some recommendations and practices that can prevent the KM obstacles:

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✔

Develop ‘Groupware’ information communication technologies like email, Lotus notes discussion bases, to encourage collaboration between people to share the knowledge. Though there exists collaboration among the company with its partners, it needs to have collaboration also on the non technical aspect too so as to create trust and closeness encouraging Efficient Knowledge Sharing.This is possible by creating a environment of trust and mutual belief.

✔ Growth Objective, Competitive pressure and Customer preference Virgin Galactic needs to concentrate on continuous expansion of the knowledge rather than economic profitability. Same for the Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Holiday. Fir this it needs to concentrate upon by having a clear cognitive mapping of its surroundings. The company needs to be environmentally driven rather than internally focused in order to achieve its full business objective.

✔

Adopting a Codification type strategy for Knowledge flow The company needs to look at Codification type KM strategy even though it follows Personalization type strategy. There are several benefits for an organization adopting this strategy like: Reuse of Knowledge assets, Reward system for contributing to the document database, High literacy workforce all add to the

✔

Emphasis on the internal and external initiatives

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Virgin Galactic needs to look beyond the product ideas and analyze the requirement of the customer needs too. Though the company concentrates on the customer experience it seems to be more on profitability factor of its offerings. Customer satisfaction at a competitive rate is the way it should be. The external factor like environmental impact also needs to be looked into.

✔ Significance of process and social capital and culture A preoccupation with technology means that company is not looking into the process through which the knowledge combines and interacts in different ways. The key process is the interaction between the people which forms the basis for social capital of an organization. Social networks can be particularly important in ensuring that the knowledge is shared.

✔ Assuming the role of an Explorer than a Exploiter Virgin and its competitors tend operate at a higher level of knowledge across many knowledge positions. The company needs to look into closing the external knowledge gap. The required position of these companies is to become an Explorer – Creator of knowledge to continue remaining a competitor at the highest level. Organization may find themselves that knowledge resources and capabilities exceeds the requirement of the organization. The company needs to further exploit the knowledge platform where the company assumes a role of an exploiter to take strategic position. The two approaches should be operated in combination. The knowledge created and acquired by the exploration process must be applied and exploited in a proper manner

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✔ Encourage Communities of practice An organization like Virgin needs to relook at the learning process within its organization. Learning in an organization is vital to knowledge creation, sharing and transfer. There should be more emphasis on people than ever since they form the intellectual assets of the company. Learning can be broken into two categories: •

“Learning about”

•

“Learning to be”

Learning about is acquiring knowledge about a product. Learning to be is something we acquire by assimilating information. Communities of practice are important to see that the process of learning goes beyond formalized training.

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An ideal KM framework for the Virgin group should be similar to this:

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Conclusion:

An organization like Virgin group is very unique in its own way of following the footsteps of its entrepreneur, businessman and adventurer Richard Branson. The brand is so popular that it is the envy of its competitors, because of the unique culture existing within the organization. Due to the diverse presence in field, the KM mechanism adopted is more complex. Every brand within the group adopts a few KM strategies, following one strategy and using other strategy to support it. The company has progressed so far in terms of growth and revenue due to the KM initiatives of the organization. With regards to an organization willing to learn from their experience, if the Virgin group revamps its initiative based on the recommendation highlighted, it will improve the current situation of the organization to achieve the desired KM state.

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