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diffi cult to transform one type of knowledge into another. A knowledge journalist is
someone who can interview knowledgeable individuals in order to extract, model, and
synthesize in a different way (format, length, level of detail, etc.) in order to increase
its scope (i.e., so that a wider audience can understand and apply this content).
Once externalized, knowledge is now tangible and permanent. It can be shared
more easily with others and leveraged throughout the organization. Good principles
of content management will need to be brought into play in order to make future
decisions about archiving, updating, and retiring externalized knowledge content. It
is particularly important not to lose attribution and authorship information when
tacit knowledge is made explicit. This involves codifying metadata or information
about the content along with the actual content.
For example, Canon decided to design and produce a mini-copier that can be used
occasionally for personal use. This new product was very different from expensive
industrial copiers, which also engendered high maintenance costs. Canon had to
design something that was relatively inexpensive with reasonable maintenance costs.
The Canon mini-copier project members understood that the most frequent problem
was with the drums, so they designed a type of drum that would last through a fair
amount of usage. They then had to be creative and design a drum that did not cost
more than the mini-copier! How did they come up with this innovation? After long
discussions, one day the leader of the unit that had to solve this problem brought
along some cans of beer and as the team was brainstorming, someone noted that beer
cans had low costs and used the same type of aluminum as copier drums did . . . the
rest, as they say, is history.
The next stage of knowledge conversion in the Nonaka and Takeuchi model is that
of combination (explicit-to-explicit), the process of recombining discrete pieces of
explicit knowledge into a new form. Some examples would be a synthesis in the form
of a review report, a trend analysis, a brief executive summary, or a new database to
organize content. No new knowledge is created per se — it is a new combination or
representation of existing or already explicit knowledge. In other words, combination
happens when concepts are sorted and systematized in a knowledge system. Some
examples would be populating a database, when we teach, when we categorize and
combine concepts, or when we convert explicit knowledge into a new medium such
as a computer-based tutorial. For example, in developing a training course or curricu-
lum for a university course, existing, explicit knowledge would be recombined into a
form that better lends itself to teaching and to transferring this content.
Another example is that of Kraft General Foods when they planned and developed
a new point-of-sale (POS) system, one that would track not only items sold but also