The Role of Tacit Knowledge to Invoation
Innovation, the source of sustained advantage for most companies, depends upon the individual and collertive expertise of employees. Some of this expertise is captured and codified in software, hardware, and processes. Yet tacit knowledge also underlies many competitive capabilities—a fact driven home to some companies in the wake of aggressive downsizing, when undervalued knowledge walked out the door.
The marvelous capacity of the human mind to make sense of a lifetime's collection of experience and to connect patterns from the past to the present and future is, by its very nature, hard to capture. However, it is essential to the innovation process. The management of tacit knowledge is relatively unexplored— particularly when compared to the work on explicit knowledge. Moreover, while individual creativity is important, exciting, and even crucial to business, the creativity of groups is equally important. The creation of today's complex systems of products and services requires the merging of knowledge from diverse national, disciplinary, and personal skill-based perspeaives. Innovation— whether it be revealed in new products and services, new processes, or new organizational forms—is rarely an individual undertaking. Creative cooperation is critical.
We wish to thank Walter Swap. Barbara Feinberg, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comn'ients and the Harvard Business School Division of Research for supporting this work.
12 CAUFORNIA MANAGEMENT REVIEW VOL40,NO,3 SPRING 1998
The Role of Tadt Knowledge in Group innovation
What isTacit Knowledge?
In the business context, we define knowledge as information that is relevant, actionable, and based at least partially on experience. Knowledge is a stibset of information; it is subjective; ii is linked to tneaningful behavior; and it has tacit elements born of experience. Business theorists have, for the sake of convenience, contrasted tacit knowledge with explicit knowledge as if
The marvelous capacity of the human mind to make sense of a lifetime's collection of experience and to connect patterns from the past to the present and future is, by its very nature, hard to capture. However, it is essential to the innovation process. The management of tacit knowledge is relatively unexplored— particularly when compared to the work on explicit knowledge. Moreover, while individual creativity is important, exciting, and even crucial to business, the creativity of groups is equally important. The creation of today's complex systems of products and services requires the merging of knowledge from diverse national, disciplinary, and personal skill-based perspeaives. Innovation— whether it be revealed in new products and services, new processes, or new organizational forms—is rarely an individual undertaking. Creative cooperation is critical.
We wish to thank Walter Swap. Barbara Feinberg, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comn'ients and the Harvard Business School Division of Research for supporting this work.
12 CAUFORNIA MANAGEMENT REVIEW VOL40,NO,3 SPRING 1998
The Role of Tadt Knowledge in Group innovation
What isTacit Knowledge?
In the business context, we define knowledge as information that is relevant, actionable, and based at least partially on experience. Knowledge is a stibset of information; it is subjective; ii is linked to tneaningful behavior; and it has tacit elements born of experience. Business theorists have, for the sake of convenience, contrasted tacit knowledge with explicit knowledge as if