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In addition to working with explicit and tacit knowledge, Nonaka (1994) has developed an organizational knowledge creation theory. The basic concepts in the theory are the two dimensions of knowledge creation: epistemological and

ontological dimension, and the four interactions between tacit and explicit

knowledge that creates knowledge: socialization, externalization, combination and internalization (Nonaka, 1994; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1998). These concepts are closely related to the two dimensions of knowledge: tacit and explicit knowledge.

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3.3.1 The Two Dimensions of Knowledge Creation

The epistemological dimension is the one dividing knowledge into tacit and explicit, at the same time as relating these two together as described in the previous subchapter.

The ontological dimension is the level of social interaction (Nonaka, 1994). The knowledge is created by individuals, not by organizations, but by focusing on enabling conditions for knowledge sharing, the individually created knowledge may propagate to larger groups, departments, organizational, and even become inter-organizational knowledge.

3.3.2 Knowledge Conversion

Knowledge creation is defined as: Human knowledge is created and expanded

through social interaction between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge

(Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1998, p. 219). An important part of Nonaka’s (1994) knowledge creating theory involves the four knowledge creational modes, socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization. Figure 3-1 illustrates these modes, and each of them is explained in detail below.

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Socialization: tacit to tacit

The socialization process involves individuals sharing their tacit knowledge. This can for instance be sharing of experience. Nonaka and Takeuchi (1998) explain that without some form of shared experience, it is extremely difficult

for one person to project himself into another individual’s thinking process (p.

220).

From our daily life we know the phrase “girls, you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them” which refers to boys having problems dealing with girls because they simply do not understand their way of thinking. This can be an instance of two groups with different experience, which is not adequately shared, causing difficulties in the socialization process. A better example may be a boy who from his early childhood have been fascinated by cars and therefore paid great attention to how his mother drives her car. He will over time have acquired significant knowledge about car driving due to the socialization process with his mother, which may have happened without any verbal conversations.

Externalization: tacit to explicit

The externalization process involves making the internal tacit knowledge more explicit. Often the tacit knowledge is hard to express in a way that is easily understandable to others, and therefore metaphors and analogies are often used in the externalization process (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1998).

The driving licence example can illustrate this by for instance the use of the analogy of a pregnant woman when using the expression “pregnant turn”. Some driving instructors in Norway use this expression to teach their students to not make a narrow turn in roundabouts, but rather take a large circular turn. The “pregnant turn” expression reminds the student of a large, circular pregnant abdomen.

Combination: explicit to explicit

The combination process involves combining different explicit knowledge to create new knowledge. Reconfiguration of existing information through

sorting, adding, combining and categorising of explicit knowledge (…) can lead to new knowledge (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1998, p. 222).

An example of the process of combination is what I will do in chapter 5, where I discuss the findings from a case study with use of the knowledge management theory from current chapter. I combine the explicit knowledge

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about knowledge management and the explicit knowledge about the challenges and solutions found at case organization to create new knowledge about how to overcome knowledge management challenges.

Internalization: explicit to tacit

The internalization process involves digesting the explicit knowledge into the

individuals’ tacit knowledge bases in the form of shared mental models, or technical know-how (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1998, p. 222). Often, this is done

by learning while working, but it can also be possible to internalize knowledge just by reading if the reading triggers other experience and the reader really understands it, it may become a part of his tacit knowledge.

An example of internalization process can be found in the greatly cited work of Orr (1990), where he studies copy machine technicians’ work. He observed that the technicians had a vast amount of tacit knowledge concerning error detection and solution discovering. The technicians internalize while working: they learn and build up a base of tacit knowledge, which comes in hand when diagnosing the machines. The management did never recognize this tacit knowledge because they never acknowledged the internalization process; rather their perception of the technicians’ work was that it was not a knowledge intensive work. According to the management, the technicians could just follow a manual for solving problems.

3.3.3 Knowledge Creation Spiral

Now, I have discussed the two dimensions of knowledge creation and the knowledge creation modes that essentially create the knowledge. To place all these concepts into a system that explains the organizational knowledge creation, Nonaka (1994) and Nonaka and Takeuchi (1998) present the spiral of organizational knowledge creation shown in Figure 3-2. The x-axis is the ontological dimension, in other words, the granularity of the unit holding the knowledge. Y-axis is the epistemological dimension, in other words, tacit and explicit knowledge.

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Figure 3-2: Organizational knowledge creation spiral. Extracted from (Nonaka, 1994).

Organizational knowledge creation, as distinct from individual knowledge creation, takes place when all four modes of knowledge creation are “organizationally” managed to form a continual cycle (Nonaka, 1994, p. 20).

Over time, the individually created knowledge will through conversion between tacit and explicit knowledge expand to groups, organization and even to an inter-organizational level of knowledge. On the way, the knowledge creational process will go faster and produce more knowledge, illustrated by the growing radius of the spiral in Figure 3-2.

The previous part of this chapter described the nature of knowledge and how a company creates knowledge. The following describes knowledge management and the different ways of focusing on this in corporations.