Beyond the Ivory Tower - Teaching Non-rational Knowledge to Business Students and Practitioners

Abstract

Recent publications in the field of KM emphasize the importance of topics such as Spirituality (e.g. Bratianu, 2017; Kaiser, 2023; Rocha & Pinheiro, 2021), Phronesis (practical wisdom) (Kragulj, 2022; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 2019; Rocha et al., 2022; Serenko, 2024), Organizational Purpose (Kerschbaum, 2022), dealing with future potentials and future-oriented innovation (Peschl, 2018, 2020) and Responsible KM (Durst, 2021) as future avenues for KM research. However, it seems that these topics have not yet entirely found their way into practice, or, although the phenomena described are inherently present in organizations, they do not receive much attention from practitioners these days. With this paper we seek to initiate discussion on how to deploy research results on topics like Spirituality, Practical Wisdom, non-rational Knowledge, future-oriented knowledge work, and Organizational Purpose into applied contexts. We argue that an essential step is to adequately train students at universities with the new content. Todays students are the leaders, entrepreneurs, and managers of tomorrow. Therefore, we present selected educational concepts that help students build competencies in understanding and applying non-rational forms of knowledge. The intention of these newly designed teaching concepts is to move our field of research out of the metaphoric ivory tower towards the application in organizations. We argue that this is a necessary step for the development of the field of KM, enabling our research to remain relevant in modern-day business and organizational environments.