Mobilizing What We Know — Reviving Innovation at Sendoa Systems

A four-round, advanced knowledge-management and intellectual-capital simulation set inside Sendoa Systems S.A., a Bilbao high-tech firm (EUR 86M revenue, 16% EBITDA, 540 staff, 310 engineers) whose innovation engine has stalled: new-product revenue has halved from 38% to 19% in four years, three senior architects holding ~EUR 2.1M of undocumented tacit knowledge have left in 18 months, and two more are eligible to retire within 18 months. A costly knowledge platform bought in 2021 sits unused because it was deployed without incentive alignment. Playing the new head of strategy with a EUR 5M budget and a one-year window, you (1) diagnose the binding intellectual-capital constraint across human, structural and relational capital, and recognise that fragile tacit knowledge is walking out the door; (2) allocate the EUR 5M across five knowledge-sharing mechanisms — communities of practice (EUR 0.6M), platform relaunch with curation (EUR 1.4M), expert-capture / cognitive apprenticeship (EUR 0.9M), cross-unit rotation and co-location (EUR 0.8M), and customer/university open innovation (EUR 1.2M) — concentrating on the urgent and high-impact rather than spreading thinly; (3) redesign HRM incentives so knowledge actually flows — reward sharing and reuse without cratering delivery, set protected time and curation ownership, and avoid simply relaunching the platform with the same share-versus-ship incentives that killed it in 2021; and (4) absorb a mid-year shock (lagging platform adoption plus an architect's early retirement) and commit a one-year roadmap that lifts new-product revenue back toward 30% while measuring innovation OUTPUT, not vanity activity. The math rewards urgency-weighted, focused, incentive-aligned knowledge mobilization and punishes the five classic errors — tool without incentive, ignoring retirement urgency, even-spreading the budget, hiring as a cure-all, and measuring activity instead of innovation outcomes. Final KPIs track the Intellectual-Capital Index, Innovation Output (new-product revenue %), Knowledge-Flow Adoption, and Tacit-Knowledge Capture against the EUR 5M cap.