Characteristics of knowledge and barriers towards innovation and improvement in collaborative manufacturing process chains

Abstract

The characteristics of knowledge relevant to initiate innovation projects or improve existing manufacturing processes have been identified against the background of an organisation participating in a collaborative manufacturing process chain. Those innovation or improvement processes rely on differing types of knowledge, which must be combined in order to determine the current state, the desired state, and the methodology to get there. In a collaborative environment, all of these knowledge types can be fragmented and stored within certain partitions resembled by people, or organisational units. Within this paper, two different organisational units, management and employees of a focal organization or those of related partners have been selected to illustrate the problem. By adapting the Johari window to map knowledge exchange, this paper identifies the characteristics of intra- and inter-organisational barriers. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.