Entrepreneurship
Nonaka: The Knowledge-Creating Company 1991
Knowledge-creating company: A company that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization, and quickly embody it in new technologies and products. A knowledge-creating companys business is continuous innovation.
Managers misunderstand what knowledge is and how a company can exploit knowledge. Knowledge is not solely information processing. There is another way most commonly seen in Japan. New knowledge can be created by tapping the tacit and highly subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches of individual employees and make these insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole. The key is the employees sense of identity with the enterprise and its mission.
Making personal knowledge available to others is the central activity of the knowledge-creating company.
Difference between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge suggest four basic patterns for creating knowledge in an organization: From tacit to tacit: o Cannot be shared. From explicit to explicit: o Nothing new is gained. From tacit to explicit: o New knowledge is gained. From explicit to tacit: o The new knowledge is internalized by others as tacit knowledge. In a knowledge-creating company these four patterns exist in dynamic interaction spiral of knowledge
Two critical steps in the spiral of knowledge: Articulation: Converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Internalization: Using the gained explicit knowledge to extend ones own tacit knowledge base.
Entrepreneurship
As tacit knowledge includes mental models and beliefs in addition to know-how, moving from the tacit to the explicit is really a process of articulating ones vision of the world what it is and what it ought to be. In this way employees reinvent themselves, the company and the world.
The process of by which a company converts tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge can be seen as: 1. To convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge it is of great use to apply figurative language and symbolism. An especially important form of figurative language is metaphor. Metaphor is seen by Nonaka as a distinctive method of perception it is a way for individuals grounded in different contexts and with different experiences to understand something intuitively through the use of imagination and symbols without the need for analysis or generalization. Metaphors are created by putting what is already known but inexpressible together in new ways. As such metaphors creates direct commitment to the creative process in the early stages of knowledge creation. This is done by putting two different and distant areas of experience into a single, inclusive symbol. Often metaphoric symbols have multiple meanings and appear logically contradictory, but this is an enormous strength as this jumpstarts the creative process as employees attempt to define more clearly the insight expressed by the metaphor. 2. The next step in the process is analogy. Analogy is a more structured process of reconciling contradictions and making distinctions. 3. The final step is to create a model. In the model contradictions get resolved and concepts become transferable through consistent and systematic logic.
The fundamental principle is redundancy. Building a redundant organization is the first step in managing a knowledge-creating company. Redundancy encourages frequent dialogue and communication. This helps in the creation of a common cognitive ground among employees and help ease the transfer of tacit knowledge. Redundancy also spreads new explicit knowledge resulting in it being able to be internalized by the employees. Redundancy can be created by dividing a team into two competing groups working to come up with the best approach. This encourages the team to look at a project from a variety of perspectives.
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Another way is through strategic rotation between different areas of technology. This facilitates understanding of the business from more perspectives and makes organizational knowledge more fluid. Free access to a companys information also help in the creation of redundancy.
Creating new knowledge is the product of a dynamic interaction between 3 roles: Frontline employees: Immersed in the day-to-day details of particular technologies, products and markets. Expert in realities of a companys business. Finds it difficult to turn their information into useful knowledge. The chaos is settled by continuously challenging employees to reexamine what they take for granted. Managers: Main job is to orient chaos towards purposeful knowledge creation. Done by providing conceptual framework helping employees making sense of their own experience. Senior managers: Gives voice to the companys future by articulating metaphors, symbols and concepts that orient knowledge-creating activities of employees.
