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102 Chapter 4

processes of intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institutionalizing (the four I ’ s).
Zietsma et al. (2002) modifi ed this slightly by including the process of attending at
the stage of intuiting and the process of experimenting at the stage of interpreting.
In KM, this knowledge creation or capture may be done by individuals who perform
this role for the organization or a group within that organization, by all members of
a community of practice (CoP) or a dedicated CoP individual — but it is really being
done on a personal level as well. Almost everyone performs some knowledge creation,
capture, and codifi cation activities in carrying out their job. Cope (2000) refers to this
as PKM (personalized KM). Within the fi rm, individuals share perceptions and jointly
interpret information, events, and experiences ( Cohen and Levinthal 1990 ) and at
some point, knowledge acquisition extends beyond the individuals and is coded into
corporate memory ( Inkpen 1995 ; Spender 1996 ; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995 ). Unless
knowledge is embedded into corporate memory, the fi rm cannot leverage the knowl-
edge held by individual members of the organization. Organizational knowledge
acquisition is the “ amplifi cation and articulation of individual knowledge at the fi rm
level so that it is internalized into the fi rm ’ s knowledge base. ” ( Malhotra 2000 , 334)
The value of tacit knowledge sharing was discovered in a surprising way at Xerox
( Roberts-Witt 2002 ), which will be discussed later in this chapter.
Many of the tacit knowledge capture techniques described in this chapter stem
from techniques that were originally used in artifi cial intelligence, more specifi cally,
in the development of expert systems. An expert system incorporates know-how gath-
ered from experts and is designed to perform as experts do. The term “ knowledge
acquisition ” was coined by the developers of such systems and referred to various
techniques such as structured interviewing, protocol or talk aloud analysis, question-
naires, surveys, observation, and simulation. Some authors (e.g., Keritsis 2001 ) even
use the term digital cloning . Knowledge management in business settings is similarly
concerned with knowledge capture, fi nding ways to make tacit knowledge explicit
(e.g., documenting best practices) or creating expert directories to foster knowledge
sharing through human – human collaboration ( Smith 2000 ). In 1989 , for example,
Feigenbaum contrasted traditional libraries as “ warehouses of passive objects where
books and journals wait for us to use our intelligence to fi nd them, to interpret them
and cause them fi nally to divulge their stored knowledge ” (p. 122) with a library of
the future where books would interact and collaborate with users.

Tacit Knowledge Capture at the Individual and Group Levels
Knowledge acquisition from individuals or groups can be characterized as the transfer
and transformation of valuable expertise from a knowledge source (e.g., human expert,
documents) to a knowledge repository (e.g., corporate memory, intranet). This process