The 12 papers in this edition are especially interesting in that I have seldom seen such a wide diversity of subjects. This collection is indeed strong evidence that the topic of Knowledge Management and its co-traveller Intellectual Capital have a remarkably diverse scope. A few years ago, perhaps a dozen or so, some academics might have thrown up their hands in horror. "How can we have a discipline with such porous boundaries?" I imagine them to have said. Well in today's academic world boundaries are increasingly difficult to define and more difficult to maintain. Subjects blur into each other. And this phenomenon is not the result of a new way of research or thinking. It is simply the result of being more cognoscente of the way the world actually works.

It would of course be wrong to say that boundaries between subjects no longer exist or that they are no longer relevant. But it is true to say that we have now a much more open mind about how we think of research and how we combine different fields of studies. We have for a while been talking about multidisciplinary research. Then we focused on interdisciplinary research. Today we sometimes talk about trans-disciplinary research. When anyone is brave enough to ask what these terms actually mean academics often run for cover.

For me the terms multidisciplinary research or interdisciplinary research or trans-disciplinary research signals that we are focusing on a real problem which like so many situations in business needs to be understood and managed while bearing in mind that it is unlikely that any one centre of knowledge will be able to provide the whole answer.

The diversity in this edition of EJKM supports this notion.

Dan Remenyi
UK
May 2007