The Growing Need to Quantify Tacit Knowledge for a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Abstract

Most of the research communities tackle Knowledge Management from a Technological point of view, and neglecting the socio-psychological side of the equation.Psychology and education offered us an invaluable tool namely: the Knowledge Transfer or Cognitive Mapping.It is a tool available to the foreign investor to help him operate in a Cross-cultural Knowledge context. Blumentritt and Johnson set up a framework to measure the degree of difficulty in transferring knowledge.Physics and the law of thermodynamics also offered us the mathematical best fit to understand knowledge acquisition and development.Just like human beings must counteract the effect of oxidation which can be regarded as the depletion of organism cells by regularly extracting anti-oxidants. If the rate of extraction is less than the rate of depletion, the organism will be in a state of degradation and ultimately death. The Firm in a similar way must counteract the effect of deterioration which is a natural process caused by the business environment, products of today are already the products of the past (Drucker).This research seeks a deeper understanding of organizational and psychological phenomena taking place during the adoption and implementation of KM in a cross-cultural context.This initiative is to assist the reader in being able to:1. Understand the difficulty to access tacit knowledge and this mainly due to the heterogeneity of mind mapping. We refer to the heterogeneity especially with regards to the difficulty of implicit knowledge transfer. Thus, the focus of the research, is to target knowledge resources requirements.2. But most importantly to help the reader gain lead time in the acquisition and management of tacit knowledge using a mathematical model.