Lots and lost of discussion on this topic. thanks for the post. I wanted to contribute a little to your assertion: I am not sure … that any societal development or global issues,such as energy consumption or healthcare needs,requires ongoing knowledge creation on a large scale.. In our (Allison, Anoush Margaryan and I) work with the energy company, one phrase we kept coming across was ‘no easy oil’. Whereas in the past getting oil out of the ground involved applying pre-existing principles: employ some people + bring in an oil rig + lay some pipes etc. (I’m oversimplifying greatly), more recently, each new oil well would inevitably present challenges which require innovative solutions (e.g. working with a supplier to develop a new chemical additive which maximised yield from a well – which may make actually drilling for oil in that place economically viable). This situation demands that the organisation looks beyond the knowledge written down or at least pre-exisitng within the organisation to new sources of knowledge beyond these traditional boundaries. The work of Hakkarainen et al (see the book Communities of Networked Expertise: http://tinyurl.com/6zp8egw) has influenced our thinking of what they term ‘innovative knowledge communities’.