While many senior executives continue to talk about the "voice of the customer," few demonstrate their commitment to this concept by spending time with customers. Many continue to use their intuition or `golden gut' in their attempt to provide superior customer value. Unfortunately, `senior executive intuition' is rarely attuned to the needs of their customers. While the competitive environment continues to intensify, executives have cut back on the time devoted to customers just when it should be increasing. This article discusses the need for senior executives to spend time with customers and provides examples of the benefits that this approach will provide.

The Cynefin Framework, developed by Dave Snowden, is used in conjunction with the definition of the nature of complex systems, to investigate developments in various knowledge innovation approaches in the 20th century. The emergent properties from this investigation provide the backbone of the development of a framework for scientific knowledge creation and knowledge innovation. The study of the various knowledge innovation approaches like Operations Research, Systems Thinking, Cybernetics, Complexity, Knowledge Management, and Scientific Method, leads to the development of a framework describing sufficient capability for trans-disciplinary knowledge innovation and knowledge creation. The proposed framework highlights the various aspects to be developed in order to develop a robust and sufficient capability which can be used for research management, knowledge innovation, scientific problem solving, and quality assurance for knowledge work. This framework can be seen as a "knowledge technology," which can be developed and implemented like any other technology. This kind of technology for organizational knowledge work is not widely available yet, which makes this work particularly interesting. A case study is presented to highlight the productivity of having used complexity techniques to solve a complex problem, thus indicating the value of one of the main arguments of the study that problems need to be approached according to their respective natures as no single approach suffices. The case study also indicates the strategic value of developing a trans-disciplinary capability which remains robust in ever-changing environments. This attribute helps to justify the costly investment of building a capability of this kind, an endeavor which is usually a multi-year project carrying a high risk of becoming sub-optimal even before it is fully operational, due to the changing demands of the environment.

This paper does not wish to enter the debate about knowledge creation versus knowledge discovery. The term `knowledge creation' is therefore used for any of these two, denoting the uncovering or creating of new knowledge, with new knowledge being knowledge not previously known (without specifying the scope of where the knowledge was not previously known).Even a superficial look at the results of scientific work through the centuries presents its unparalleled success in the pursuit of gaining understanding and creating new knowledge. This historical success story did not inhibit the strong challenge against the "restricting" scientific method in the 20^th century. This challenge came about precisely because the proponents of science tried to extrapolate the success of scientific method beyond the limits of the natural world into social systems like management and organizational sciences. In these spheres the "classical Newtonian scientific method" proved to be less successful, and some costly failures resulted.

Technology for Knowledge Innovation, complex systems, knowledge innovation, scientific knowledge creation, quality assurance, framework, complexity techniques, trans-disciplinary capability, organizational sciences, management, organizational knowledge.