Dr. Karl-Erik Sveiby is often described as one of the "founding fathers" of Knowledge Management, having pioneered many of the fundamental concepts. In 1986 he published his first book in Sweden in which he explored how to manage the rapidly growing "Knowledge Companies", organizations that have no traditional production, only the knowledge and the creativity of their employees. It became an instant bestseller and inspired the very early "Swedish movement" in knowledge management in both research and practice. His book 1990 (Sw. "Kunskapsledning") was the worlds first with "Knowledge Management" in the title.

Being owner of one of Sweden's largest publishing companies and a manager himself, he recognized the need to measure the intangible assets, and he went on pioneering accounting practices for intangible assets, testing them in his own company. In 1989 he published the results of a working group in a book "The Invisible Balance Sheet", proposing a theory for measuring “Knowledge Capital”, by dividing it into three categories, Customer Capital, Individual Capital and Structural Capital. The approach was adopted by the Swedish Council of Service Industries as their standard recommendation for Annual Reports in 1993, the first ever standard in this field. One of the adopters was the Swedish insurance company Scandia, which relabeled Sveiby’s theory “Intellectual Capital" in its first Annual Report Supplement on Intellectual Capital in 1995.

Today he is Associate Professor at the Swedish Business School in Helsinki, Honorary Professor at Macquarie Graduate School of Business in Sydney and advisor to corporations and governments worldwide. His approaches are practical and, faithful to his own teachings, he does not believe in lectures or information as methods of transferring knowledge, so he spends a lot of time on developing tools that can help managers and consultants round the world implementing the concepts in practice: The Intangible Assets Monitor, Tango, K-MAP, The Invisible Balance Sheet, to mention a few. Some of the companies taking his advice and using his methods are: ABB, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Ericsson, Skandia, National Australia Bank, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Siemens, Intel, Microsoft, Cap Gemini, Oracle, MTN South Africa. Internet versions of his tools are available on-line via ,www.sveibytoolkit.com.

His acclaimed web site www.sveiby.com.au is visited by over 200,000 people annually and regarded one of the top resources on Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital on the web.