Baoman's Blog

This is related to my earlier post on knowledge cities, see here. The Hong Kong Census & Statistics Bureau has published this paper on Hong Kong as a Knowledge-based Economy which you can download here Hong Kong as a Knowledge Based Economy | Aug 2009 and a short description of the same here Hong Kong as a Knowledge Based Economy – Short Description | Aug 2009. You can go to their website and download the complete statistics from here.

The bureau measures in these four areas: ICT (information and communication technologies), human resources development, innovation systems and business environment. ICT in Hong Kong shows high usage of mobile phones, personal computers at home and in the workplace, internet access thru broadband and work-related websites. This makes sense considering Hong Kong is only half-a-step away from gadget-crazed Japan. Human resources development basically means education. Hong Kong spends large amounts on education and it has increased dramatically over the past 10 years. This is true. However, most of the increase in in tertiary education and support for R&D at the university levels. Primary and secondary classes hover around 40 students per class and the government is closing primary and secondary schools and laying of teachers in order to keep the student/teacher ratio high. This is flies in the face of any rational plan to support a knowledge-based economy. Innovation systems are difficult for me to understand but it seems that they are measuring 3 kinds of ‘innovation activity’, technological innovation, which includes R&D and non-technologial innovation, things like business processes, strategy, marketing and organization. Hong Kong has many more researchers from 10 years ago but pure R&D expenditure has only gone up slightly. Overall, ‘innovation activity’ has grown sharply. The assumption is made that increase in technology spurs forward innovation and that better business-results are the result of innovation. I’m more inclined to believe that other more pressing pressures spur on innovation. I still remember Max Boiset’s statement that ‘innovation springs from chaos’. The business environment in Hong Kong is flexible, fair up to a point, business formation is one of the easiest anywhere in the world. However, the business models in Hong Kong that is most successful is monopoly or oligopoly, seen most spectacularly in the city’s property sector – basically only 4 major players and the collusion with the HK government to maintain prices is astonishing.

I do agree that on balance Hong Kong is a knowledge-based economy. The perception among most of my KM classmates doesn’t seem so positive. At a end-of-term class gathering at the HK Science & Technology Park we were doing a knowledge cafe on the theme of ‘how would we spend $10 million to improve HK’ and the conversation got on to jobs, education, entrepreneurs and the use of knowledge and the consensus was that Hong Kong was very poor at using its people’s knowledge. People cannot find ‘good’ jobs because there was some mismatch between what they ‘did’ and what was considered a ’success’. Perceptions of success in Hong Kong are based on money (our theme is a good indication of this) and success is defined in a very narrow and traditional way; professions like medicine, lawyers, accountancy are prized most and then followed by engineers and technicians and the bottom is made-up of teachers, salesman, designers and any sort of support service like retail, food, customer support and construction. No-one in Hong Kong is ever going to admit that there is a massive amount of know-how and expertise in the food industry or retail expertise in business is as valuable as preparing a balance sheet. This attitude means that students are only pushed into a narrow range of occupations and those that resist are labeled failures. This is most unfortunate because what Hong Kong should emphasize is exactly the areas it ignores; there is no world-class culinary institute in Hong Kong, design schools are poorly funded and made to be part of other institutions and the study of successful retailing is simply not on the map in a business education for a HK student.

What could make it better? We didn’t have time to continue the discussion but for me just opening up to the thought that success is more than a white-collar job would be good step for Hong Kong.

I attended the ICKM 2009, International Conference on Knowledge Management: Management Knowledge for Global and Collaborative Innovations, on 3-4 December, at the Hong Kong University.  There were many sessions, some grumbling that maybe there were a few too many sessions but I rather liked having the choice.  Some highlights for me are described below.  The complete program can be downloaded here – ICKM 2009 Program.


Keynote by Professor Max Boiset explaining how collaboration was managed at the CERN’s Atlas experiment.  Knowledge is a combination of the experiential, narrative and abstract which correspond to unmodified, structured and codified respectively.  His idea is that the non-hierarchical setup held together by Memorandum of Understandings which is the CERN works because there is a ‘boundary object, the Atlas detector’ (a very big and complicated machine that detects the sub-atomic particles after they have pulled around the ring) that provides the organizations with a purpose and a reason to collaborate.  Some good ideas on complexity, chaos, clans, bureaucracies, fiefs, clans and markets. His ideas on complexity and chaos are similar to Dave Snowden’s.  Chaos is the well-spring of innovation. The presentation is here: Max Boisot | The Case of the Atlas Experiment at CERN | ICKM 3 Dec 2009


Keynote by Dr. Edward Rogers, CKO, Goddard Space Flight Centre of NASA, explained the 10 things he did to enable knowledge at NASA. The two that stuck with me were understand how people learn and what do we do that makes us a success. In particular I remember him saying something like ….’the good think about a degree from an Ivy League university means you don’t have to use big words’… Its a good observation in the KM field where too many people like to impress with their vast vocabulary.


Bonnie Cheuk from Environmental Resource Management spoke about really ‘doing Web 2.0′ in a business environment.  You must coach the leaders and prepare them to be surprised. There is likely to be both positive and negative communication enabled by Web 2.0 and leaders need to be prepared.  The tool is not the focus so don’t worry so much if you are using tried and tired MS Sharepoint or cool and frisky Jive – the focus needs to be on the process and the people.


Kwan Yi from the University of Kentucky spoke about social tagging in comparison to Library of Congress classification.  Surprisingly, social tags matched LCC classifiers 70% of the time. This sort of research needs to be watched because there is not enough attention paid to professional classification and its interaction with social tagging.


Matsuko Woo from HK University spoke about using wikis with primary 5 students in their English writing class. The students were much more motivated to write and interact. They worked in class and at home and their parents could see their efforts. The teachers liked the immediacy of the writing process.  The teachers received an update when the students had made a posting to the wiki. The teachers could give feedback very soon afterwards to the students.


Andrew Chan and Ivy Chan from HK Community College spoke about using blogs with 2nd year community college students in an organizational learning class.  The students understanding of OL did improve. This is significant because OL is a topic that requires internal reflection.  Even those who participated the least said they enjoyed the blogging experience. The student participation was good and this was clearly attributable to the weekly feedback from Andrew and Ivy to the students on their blogs.


Louisa Mei Chun Lam from Hong Kong’s Chinese University spoke about pulling together the sense-making theories of Dervin, Snowden and Weick and applying it as a framework for interviews with doctors and nurses in Hong Kong public and private hospitals.  Her comparison and contrast of the theories was excellent.  The interview results will lead to some fruitful research.


Alvin Kwan from Hong Kong University spoke about comparing blogging by Information Management Students and Nursing Students while doing internships. Nursing students were much more motivated to blog. He believes it is because the nursing students have much more common experience to share during the internship.  The nursing students received much more feedback from their professors.  This is a common theme in the ‘use of Web 2.0 in education’; if there is a setting of defined goals and frequent meaningful feedback from teachers there is much better participation from students.


Anna Gamvrous from Baker & McKenzie spoke about lawyers use of Web 2.0.  Lawyers use LinkedIN personally and some firms in Hong Kong are beginning to use ‘official’ Twitter announcements.  Most of the rest of Web 2.0, blogging, chatting, social networking doesn’t happen inside law firms officially but lawyers may use it personally.  Law firms basically wait until their clients request them to use Web 2.0.  Surprisingly, B&K still print all email and other electronic records.


Charles Wong from the Construction Industry Council in Hong Kong and formerly from the Hong Kong Police Force spoke about his collaboration experience during the SARS crises in Hong Kong.  How do people collaborate when there backs are up against the wall?  Surprisingly not that well.  It took him 10 days to convince the head of the SARS crises unit to use the police force’s MIIDSS tracking system which was instrumental in controlling the outbreak. MIIDSS was supported by Chief Inspector Alan Chan Lun from the HKPF, see here.  

When I first encountered this term ‘knowledge capital’ a few months back I had no idea what it meant. That was part of the ‘Knowledge Cities’ conference held in Shenzhen, China in November, see my post about Future Centres. I didn’t attend that conference but I did catch Jay Chatzkel seminar on 9 November, “Hong Kong as a Knowledge Capital”. Knowledge Cities are cities that deliberately go about making themselves sustainable based on what they know and how they use what they know. An example of a knowledge capital was Lisbon in the 15th century when it became the centre for exploration and eventually the establishment of the Portuguese mercantile empire. Knowledge on what was out there beyond the horizon made that empire possible. It seems to me that a knowledge city needs to have a vision, purpose, education and goals. Jay Chatzkel was very impressed with what he had seen in Shenzhen and learned about other cities in China which visibly made the Hong Kong audience cringe in their soft chairs in a wood-paneled tiered lecture hall. This was Jay’s first trip to China and Hong Kong (same country different place) and he didn’t understand that here in Hong Kong praise for China is very seldom given. He went on to propose that Hong Kong needed to integrate itself more and more with China if it was going to succeed. Take a look at his website here.

This point has been made many time before by others. There are massive infrastructure projects to link Hong Kong and the Perl River Delta; from bridge to Macau and Zhuhai to electronic smart ID cards to make for fast access between Hong Kong and the mainland. I suspect many outside Hong Kong don’t know that the border with Hong Kong is still very real and mainland Chinese need visas to enter and remain in the city.

Maintaining a separate Hong Kong is still the order of the day. This is partly because we must maintain our British inherited legal system. This legal system makes Hong Kong unique among Chinese cities as a place where a business contract can be adjudicated in a court with a very good chance of non-interference from government interests. However, the main reason to maintain a separate Hong Kong is that Hong Kong people don’t like mainlanders. They like them enough to take their money when they come for shopping and visiting the much maligned Disneyland but not enough to remember that almost everyone in Hong Kong is a refugee from China, myself included. It is a very strange state of affairs. It is the most extreme example of city-folk not liking country-folk that I’ve ever seen.

I’m still not sure exactly what one of these ‘knowledge cities’ is but it seems that Hong Kong is failing in many respects. It lacks leadership – this is not surprising for those of us who live here and know our Chief Executive Donald Tsang and his team of toads, sorry Executive Councillors, – it lacks a coherent education systems – it is laying off primary school teachers so class sizes remain around 40 and at the same time has a new program to spend 100’s of millions of HK$ to support foreign (read not mainland Chinese because rumor is that mainland Chinese are not eligible for this program) PhD students studying in Hong Kong universities. This is part of the problem of Hong Kong – it only sees itself in relation to something outside of China and preferably something European. Twelve years after the handover and Hong Kong is still an outpost of northern Europe perched on the coast of southeast China.