My degree was in pure maths, which helped structure this process.
Since it is without any distractions from real world assumptions and
complications, I'm not sure there is a more structured way to build
knowledge than pure maths. There are a couple of key ways pure maths
works that are pretty helpful in the real world, also.

The first is the use of other people's work. In maths, people spend
their whole lives proving that something is true. They get the result
named after them, but what they also get is the knowledge that their
work will help others to go further. Because in maths, once something
is proved you can take that piece of knowledge and make use of it. You
can take one result that one person has proved and use it to help you
prove something else. There's no need to re-prove it. No need to even
really understand how the first person proved it. You can just take it
and make use of it. No progress would be made if you had to revisit
things that had already been proved.

The second is that people write things down and share them. Results
and logic are written down using a common language, so that people can
look them up and understand them. The process would fall to pieces if
people didn't write things down, didn't explain how they reached their
conclusions, didn't share their work and didn't use a common language.

They're pretty simple things, right? No magic. No wizardry (although
if you read pure maths it does look kinda like wizardry :). But yet in
business we often don't work like this.

In business we often fail to learn from others. We start from scratch
all the time. We forget to ask ourselves 'what do we already know
about this problem that we can build on?'. And when we work something
out, crunch some data or draw some conclusions, we fail to write it
down and share it properly. Documents and presentations capture only
part of the story, the rest of which floats in the head of the author
or in the room during the presentation and then is gone.

So here is to learning from others, building our knowledge and not
re-creating the wheel. And here is to writing things down, using a
common language and sharing our work. Here is to standing on the
shoulders of giants and to helping others to stand on our shoulders.
Sometimes its the simple things that help us to make a big difference.