Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management and automation, has just been selected from a list of 48 nominated companies in various sectors to compete in the European regional finals of the Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) research program.

MAKE is the leading global ranking of knowledge-driven companies. Set up by the KNOW Network, which has dozens of member organizations worldwide, the ranking considers a comprehensive range of knowledge management best practices, such as the ability to create a knowledge-driven culture, develop knowledge workers, maximize intellectual capital and transform enterprise knowledge into stakeholder value.

This nomination as a MAKE Finalist acknowledges the Schneider Electric employees involved in knowledge management and particularly in the two cornerstones of its knowledge-sharing policy: the Internal Schneider Electric Encyclopedia (iSEE), modeled on Wikipedia, and “Communities@Work”, the network of communities of practices sharing knowledge and experience in specific areas across the organization. A good example is the iSEE community of contributors to the encyclopedia. Communities@Work currently has 20,000 members in 170 communities, while iSEE has 30,000 monthly visits to its 7,000 pages and has been consulted at least once by every Schneider Electric employee.

For Schneider Electric’s leaders, knowledge is only useful if it is passed on. Louis-Pierre Guillaume, Knowledge Management Officer at Schneider Electric, commented: “Knowledge sharing is essential to innovation and agility, which in turn are prerequisites for performance. We need to reuse best practices and focus our resources where they matter, rather than reinvent the wheel, which is a source of unnecessary expenses.” This policy is paying off: in a 2016 survey of the Communities@Work network, 65 percent of members said they had solved problems more quickly through their communities, while more than half said their communities had improved the innovation process.