Knowledge management has clearly evolved into two distinct schools or generations of practice. The first school (first-generation KM) is largely supply-side in its orientation. It seeks only to enhance the supply of existing knowledge to people who need it. Second-generation KM adds to this a demand-side focus, which seeks also to enhance the production of new knowledge in response to the demand for it. Second-generation KM is therefore more balanced and complete insofar as it addresses the whole life cycle of knowledge production and integration, not just knowledge sharing (a form of integration).

Out of second-generation KM has come an instantiation of it known as The New Knowledge Management (TNKM). The new KM is an implementation of Karl Popper's fallibilism and falsificationism according to which all knowledge is seen as impossible to prove, but not without errors that we can discover and eliminate. Doing so (hopefully) moves us closer to the truth. Thus, the quality of our knowledge steadily improves as we eliminate the errors inside of it.

The main purpose and goal of TNKM is to help organizations transition from whatever their current knowledge processing system might be to the ideal of the Open Enterprise. The Open Enterprise is predicated on the view that top performance in enterprise-wide learning and innovation can only be achieved by creating the conditions in which knowledge processing is politically open and inclusive of all stakeholders. It is also knowledge claim centric in the sense that the quality of knowledge is determined on the basis of its own merits, and not by reference to who produces it or the level of support it enjoys.

To build and maintain an Open Enterprise, practitioners of the new KM can use a variety of tools and methods, especially the Policy Synchronization Method offered by Macroinnovation Associates.