The Company Xerox Corporation is one of the largest producers of printers and photocopiers in the world.

It has more 90,000 employees spread in several Countries and 25,000 representatives. Holsthouse director of Corporate Strategy at Xerox Corporation - says Xerox was set out to be as educated as possible about knowledge management (KM). The organization has spent considerable financial resources and time to codify the collective knowledge through its research, consortium work, and sponsorship of research. The Needs During a study on its representatives behavior, Xerox noticed that most of the causes of breakdowns in the machines they sold couldnt be found in any of the firms record of cases. However representatives, thanks to their own knowledge and the knowledge they shared among each other during lunch breaks, were able to solve those problems. Xerox therefore understood that they needed: To make the implicit knowledge of the employees emerge and then codify it. - To find the most suitable means to make the detoxified knowledge be shared by the whole firm. - To allow an easy and fast access to that knowledge. - To motivate employees so as to make them give up the idea that knowledge was an exclusive personal advantage, facilitate its sharing, and foster the creation of new solutions and strategies to improve their business. Solutions The solution, called Eureka project, was the creation of: - An electronic database, in which they stored best practices, ideas and solutions. - An intranet for representatives to make knowledge accessible to the whole company and facilitate the information sharing. Implementation Method Eureka projects implementation can be shortly described as follows: - A group of anthropologists of the Xeroxs Palo Alto Research Center was given the task to study the behavior of the representatives when carrying out their working activity. The results these researchers achieved were shared with other scientists through a Web site, called Docushare. - The 25,000 representatives were given a portable computer to connect to the intranet from anywhere in the world. - To motivate people, business managers decided, based on a proposal of the representatives, not to give recognition in economic but in personal prestige terms. Ideas or the experience of a representative, once become a business patrimony had to have its inventor or experimenters name. A selective committee (composed by representatives designated by vote) was appointed to select best proposals and ideas.

Key Factors The ability to recognize the need for a knowledge management approach to solve their problems and the adopted incentive system can be considered as the key success factors. The validity of a KM project is also strictly linked to the economic resources that it succeeds in recovering and saving up. In that perspective, the project Eureka made the Xerox Corporation save about the 5-10% on the job developed from the representatives and about 10 million dollars on the cost of pieces or replaced machines.