Knowledge diffusion in a specialist organization: Observational and Data-Driven case study

Abstract

Management practices and information technologies to handle knowledge of satellite manufacturing organizations may prove to be complex. As such knowledge (with its explicit and tacit constituents) is assumed to be one of the main variables whilst a distinguishing factor of such organizations; amidst those specialist in nature, to survive within a marketplace. Their main asset is the knowledge of certain highly imaginative individuals that appear to share a common vision for the continuity of the organization. Satellites and their related services remain a good example of that. From early pioneers to modern day satellite manufacturing firms, one can see a large amount of risk at every stage in the development of a satellite or a related service, from inception to design phase, from design to delivery, from lessons learnt from failures to those learnt from successes, and from revisions to design and development of successful missions. In their groundbreaking book The Knowledge Creating Company (1995), Nonaka et al laid out a model of how organizational knowledge is created through four conversion processes, being from: tacit to explicit (externalization), explicit to tacit (internalization), tacit to tacit (socialization), and explicit to explicit (combination). Key to this model is the authors' assertion that none are individually sufficient. All must be present to fuel one another. However, such knowledge creation and diffusion was thought to have manifested and only applied within large organizations and conglomerates. Observational and systematic (corpus-based) studies-through analysis of specialist text, can support research in knowledge management. Since text could be assumed to portray a trace of knowledge. In this paper we are to show how knowledge diffuses in a specific environment, and thus could be modeled by specialist text. That is dealing with the satellite manufacturing domain, and having embedded within the knowledge about the business sector and knowledge domain. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.