Recession? Can't find the right people? Can't scale? Knowledge of your company is owned by your company. It is yours! Capture it and distribute it. Don't hire new people every time.

One of the first problems I ever solved was scalability of expert knowledge with an instrument that later turned out to be an online community. We captured expert knowledge from a few scarce resources and made that available at a scale of 30 members/employee. No need to hire more people or supplement attrition as we already captured the knowledge and did not depend anymore on a busy local hero.

After that we realized we did not know everything and our customers were filling the blanks for us. Whether you are (going to be) hit by a recession or you just can't find the right people, HR may be not the only place to solve that problem. Instead, in a few years' time, we were able to do a lot more business with the same people by using that online community instrument.

The benefits were large and obvious:

• Customers had access to our IP: anytime anywhere

• Our bottleneck Subject Matter Experts were relieved of pressure and were working on the next wave of evolution

• No need to add or replace workforce all the time

Collective knowledge is bigger than your company knowledge!