Events

Forward Thinking Workshop: Building Organizational Structure to Support Future Goals is a virtual event hosted on Zoom. The event is free to attend and will take place on May 12 from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Invest WindsorEssex, in partnership with the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Centre, the Odette School of Business (University of Windsor) and AV Gauge, invites businesses across all sectors to participate in the fourth workshop of the Forward Thinking series.

Building Organizational Structure to Support Future Goals

Today's companies have a huge collection of knowledge within their organization but accessing it in a timely manner is often a challenge. The knowledge must be actionable and accessible. This collective intelligence is critical to a company’s performance and can be trapped inside an employee’s mind, walk out the door with a retiree, or be fragmented between machines, hard drives, and cloud storage. In most cases, the knowledge is also incomplete making it essentially unusable. That knowledge will cost time to retrieve, decode and employ - time that other companies are using to get ahead. Access to information is key to the decision-making process, and the ability of employees to perform their work efficiently and optimally. What will differentiate companies in the future is not their products and services, but how they manage what they know.

In this workshop, you will consider your own existing structures and strategies for managing performance-critical knowledge and learn ways for improving them. This workshop builds on the three previous “Forward Thinking Series” workshops that focused on distinguishing tacit and explicit knowledge, including knowledge assets in succession planning and valuation performance-critical knowledge assets.

You will also hear from a professional Human Resources Manager from the local manufacturing sector, who will share her experience and expertise in the field.

• Agile approaches to knowledge management.
• The value of building a central repository that is secure and quick and easy to access.
• Getting buy-in from all employees to document and share knowledge.
• Creating a knowledge editing function to ensure that the organization’s knowledge store is current.

• Appreciate the need to build a sustainable infrastructure and strategies
• Reveal performance-critical knowledge stored in the tacit experience of expert workers
• Learn about knowledge management structures, strategies, and methods for developing a robust knowledge transfer infrastructure and recognizing its benefits

Bharat Maheshwari

Bharat Maheshwari is a university professor working in the areas of strategy and innovation management. His experience across a wide variety of disciplines includes a special interest in supply chains, enterprise systems, and change management. Even as an academic, Bharat is not content to stay in an ivory tower; he would rather interact with a world where very little is outside the realm of possibility.

While working with industry (and keeping his finger on the pulse of the Windsor-Essex region), Bharat is usually thinking about process improvement, seeking out synergies, and finding the blue in blue ocean strategies. Bharat has also cofounded and mentored a number of successful start-ups. Bharat has also co-authored more than 50 peer reviewed articles and has been a key-note speaker in many conferences.

Paul Rousseau

Paul Rousseau is a post-secondary educator with over 40 years' experience at St. Clair College and the University of Windsor. He is a Future Lab mentor where he currently supports projects focusing on knowledge transfer and succession planning. Paul‘s areas of expertise include creative problem-solving, product and service innovation and design thinking.

Laura McCabe

Laura McCabe is a project manager and graphic facilitator who helps clients and their teams to visualize where they are today, and where they want to be tomorrow. In the gap between those two places, Laura works collaboratively with clients to create a plan with one goal: get the chicken scratch off the back of the cocktail napkin and into implementation.

Before her current consulting work, Laura worked for 10 years consulting with clients on freelance creative projects, and she is often still happiest with a marker in her hand (it’s a whiteboard marker now, but she will settle for a pencil in a pinch).

Inna Turkova

With over 20 years of progressive experience in Global Human Resources Management and Administration with manufacturing, non-for-profit and public service organizations, backed by CHRL and GPHR professional designations, Inna Turkova has practical knowledge and expertise in all functional competencies of HR, and particularly Strategic Planning, Recruitment & Selection, Health & Safety and Benefits Administration.

In her current role of the Corporate HR Manager, Inna oversees legal compliance and leads various HR programs and initiatives for over 300 employees worldwide spread across four domestic and two international company facilities. Equipped with a Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations and Master’s Degree in Business Administration, Inna holds an advisory role in the Strategic Management processes of the company.