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Explaining organizational knowledge creation with a knowledge maturing model

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Knowledge Management Research & Practice

Abstract

Social media challenge knowledge management because of encouraging conversations, networking and participation in more distributed, diverse and dynamic ways of knowledge development and increasingly important individuals’ interests driving them. Hence, we need to understand the complex relationships between different qualities of knowledge developed in informal and formal processes as well as for overcoming misalignments in routines, tools and infrastructures supporting organizational knowledge creation. This paper contributes a maturation perspective towards explaining organizational knowledge creation and presents a knowledge maturing model, which is grounded in organizational practice and validated with qualitative and quantitative empirical and design studies. The results describe how characteristics of knowledge and support by IT change between phases of knowledge maturing. Our findings confirm theories of organizational knowledge creation with respect to expanding scopes from individuals through communities to organizations moving from interest-driven knowledge exploration in informal contexts to goal-driven knowledge exploitation in formal contexts. The maturation perspective adds to our understanding that organizational knowledge creation is not simply a continuous process. Phases that emphasize changeability alternate with phases concerned with stability. Knowledge develops in contexts that need to switch multiple times between opening up for new knowledge and filtering relevant knowledge and between de- and re-contextualization.

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Acknowledgements

This work was co-funded by the European Commission under the Information and Communication Technologies theme of the Seventh Framework Programme, Integrating Project MATURE (Contract No. 216356, http://mature-ip.eu).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Ronald Maier

  2. Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Andreas Schmidt

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  1. Ronald Maier
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  2. Andreas Schmidt
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Correspondence to Ronald Maier.

Appendix

Appendix

Table A1

Table A1 Statistics on the phases
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Table A2

Table A2 Software used to support the phases
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Table A3

Table A3 Barriers affecting the phases
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Maier, R., Schmidt, A. Explaining organizational knowledge creation with a knowledge maturing model. Knowl Manage Res Pract 13, 361–381 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/kmrp.2013.56

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