Curating knowledge
The hidden cost of trapped knowledge — and how to set it free
Every organization has it. Tucked away in a shared drive. Buried in an outdated slide deck. Sitting quietly in someone’s head, waiting to leave when they do. We’re talking about trapped knowledge. And it’s more expensive than you might think.
Ryan Macpherson
June 24, 2025
On this page
The problem
At Coassemble, we estimate that most growing businesses are sitting on over $500,000 worth of internal knowledge going to waste each year. It’s the kind of knowledge that could accelerate onboarding, reduce support costs, improve team alignment, and lower customer churn—if only it were easier to share.
And yet, it sits idle.
According to a report by Panopto, 42% of valuable company knowledge isn’t documented anywhere. Employees spend an average of 5.3 hours every week searching for information, equating to more than six full workweeks lost per employee annually. The result? Slower ramp-ups, duplicated work, frustrated customers, and teams that feel like they’re constantly reinventing the wheel.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Why knowledge gets stuck
In most businesses, knowledge isn’t scarce—it’s just poorly transferred.
It lives in inconsistent tools. It’s trapped in email threads. It’s hidden in legacy slide decks no one updates. When someone leaves, their know-how leaves with them. When someone joins, they’re left to piece together how things work from scratch.
Even experienced employees struggle to share or find knowledge efficiently. And across industries—from startups to service teams to nonprofits—the pattern is the same: traditional tools weren’t built for the speed, scale, or structure of modern work.
Take a closer look:
Let’s take HR. When onboarding is manual or inconsistent, new hires take longer to ramp, and first impressions fall flat. If it takes three months to fully onboard a new employee—and they rely on shadowing or one-off coaching to get there—you’re burning time and salary just to get them up to speed. According to SHRM, the average cost of hiring a new employee is over $4,700, not including lost productivity during onboarding.v
Or product teams. In SaaS companies, for example, new features launch weekly. But if internal teams and customers don’t understand what’s changed, support tickets pile up, sales teams fumble demos, and customer success can’t confidently promote adoption. Internal product knowledge is one of the most under-leveraged growth levers for tech companies—and too often, it’s stuck in someone’s head or hidden in tools no one checks.
Then there’s internal learning and development. L&D teams often act as gatekeepers for training, but they’re under-resourced and over-requested. When business-critical knowledge depends on formal course creation, backlogs build, and learning slows. That bottleneck doesn’t just affect team performance—it limits organizational agility.
And these are just a few scenarios. Whether you’re scaling a remote team, supporting a franchise network, or managing field operations, the challenge is the same: important knowledge exists—but it’s not getting to the people who need it.
The new model: living, moving knowledge
At Coassemble, we believe knowledge transfer should feel like knowledge in motion.
It shouldn’t sit in a PDF. It shouldn’t depend on someone’s availability. It should move—across your business, between your teams, to your customers.
That’s why we created Coassemble: a platform that transforms static docs, internal processes, and subject-matter expertise into interactive, branded learning experiences—without needing a designer, developer, or learning specialist. Coassemble isn’t an LMS or a document repository. It’s the missing layer that helps knowledge move—clearly, quickly, and at scale.
Whether it’s turning onboarding guides into engaging walk-throughs, converting sales playbooks into shareable micro-lessons, or packaging product updates into scalable training for customers and teams, Coassemble enables fast, consistent knowledge delivery. And because it’s trackable, flexible, and easy to update, your training evolves with your business.
Why this matters now
The way we work has changed. Teams are more distributed. Product cycles are shorter. Budgets are tighter. Expectations are higher. All of this increases the need for clear, scalable knowledge transfer.
But legacy tools haven’t kept pace. Static content, siloed systems, and outdated training workflows create friction instead of flow.
And the cost is real.
IDC estimates that Fortune 500 companies lose $31.5 billion annually due to ineffective knowledge sharing (source).
McKinsey found that connected employees—those with easy access to shared knowledge—increase productivity by 20–25% (source).
Deloitte research shows that companies with strong learning cultures are 92% more likely to innovate and 58% more prepared for future demand (source).
These aren’t just enterprise issues. Mid-sized teams feel the same drag—10 to 15 hours of duplicated work, missed communication, and knowledge friction every week per employee. Across a team of 50, that adds up to thousands of lost hours and hundreds of thousands in wasted salary and opportunity.
The bottom line
Trapped knowledge is one of the most overlooked barriers to growth—and one of the most solvable.
By making knowledge easy to package, easy to share, and easy to update, Coassemble gives businesses a way to turn what they know into what others can use—fast. Not through big change management projects or complex infrastructure—but through practical, repeatable knowledge transfer that supports people, performance, and progress.
Your team already has the knowledge. Coassemble helps you move it.
Ready to scale knowledge without slowing down?
Make knowledge sharing effortless—no bottlenecks, just team-powered growth.
