About Knowledge Universe

I just finished an article in the newest issue of Brand Eins and this one was about Mike Milken, the guy that quasi invented the junk bond and made billions in the process. The interesting thing is that after having been to prison for insider-trading, market manipulation and the like, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, given 18 months to live and survived. This seems to have changed his life and he has since started several foundations. As the article pointed out, he is currently revolutionizing the medical research market and really speeding things up. FasterCures is one of his ventures, and The Milken Family Foundation is focusing both on medicine and on the other part, education.

I can totally relate to his idea that education will gain evermore importance in the future, but I have to admit that he is thinking big. He has founded Knowledge Universe in 1996, together with his brother and Larry Ellison, with a total of $500 million it seems! Ellison is said to be a silent partner that just has access to Milken for an hour a week … including his rolodex which is impressive to say the least.

This company was a $1.75 billion empire in 2001 and had 14k employees. You can take a look at this Forbes article on KU, because as you will have seen if you clicked the link, Knowledge Universe’s website has nothing but a contact eMail. They don’t really like publicity. For some people they are even starting to be too big. A report from the Arizona State University from April 2004 entitled Knowledge Universe and Virtual Schools: Educational Breakthrough or Digital RAid on the Public Treasury? goes a bit deeper into finding out how the company is structured. What Milken seems to be banking on is that human capital is both untapped enough and not included enough in the balance sheets of company, something my knowledge management tutors would love to hear.

If you want to read a bit more about KU quasi from their web site, check out this page from Luna Design who seem to have done an earlier relaunch and still have that in their portfolio. :)

All this gets really interesting if you take all the basic idea about web 2.0 into account, the basic idea that we have the internet now, that it can be used to connect things. KU is already using that via subsidiaries in tracking what children are learning and what their status is, updating the courses on a learning device on a regular basis with the most fitting learning material. This can be tracked through the lifetime of a person on this earth and learning will be a central part of life in the future. A billion and billion dollar industry. You can interconnect all those companies and really find out how people learn, how they improve, what they find, notice who the major intelligent ones are, even push them in the right direction if you are evil. But all in all knowledge about knowledge and knowledge creation is a very powerful knowledge.

It’s a business that is challenging enough for somebody who invented junk bonds and believes in technology. It should be something to take notice of.

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