Knowledge is often tacit and "sticky", i.e. highly context-specific and therefore costly to transfer to a different setting. This paper examines the methods used by firms to facilitate cross-site knowledge sharing by "thinning" knowledge, that is, by stripping knowledge of its contextual richness. An interview-based study of cross-site knowledge sharing in three industries (consulting, industrial materials, and high-tech products) indicated that highly developed knowledge-sharing systems do not necessarily involve extensive codification and recombination of personalized knowledge. Many multinational firms evidently conceive their knowledge-sharing systems with more modest objectives in mind than any large-scale "learning spirals" featuring iterative conversion of personalized knowledge into codified knowledge and vice-versa. A typology of knowledge-thinning systems was derived by interpreting the field study results from the perspective of knowledge-thinning methods used in earlier eras of history. The typology encompasses topographical, statistical and diagrammatic knowledge-thinning systems. (authors' abstract)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:3860 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Kasper, Helmut, Lehrer, Mark, Mühlbacher, Jürgen, Müller, Barbara |
| Publisher | Sage |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1056492610370366, http://www.uk.sagepub.com/home.nav, http://epub.wu.ac.at/3860/ |
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