Effective Knowledge Acquisition Research Articles

Ethical and Effective Acquisition of Knowledge and Skills in Veterinary Education and Training

Ethical and Effective Acquisition of Knowledge and Skills in Veterinary Education and Training

EThekwini Municipality’s intranet for augmenting knowledge–sharing in the organisation

Background: The age of technology, where information and knowledge perform important roles in the organisational context, creates an opportunity for local government organisations (such as metropolitan municipalities) in South Africa to support knowledge–sharing. One such technology that supports knowledge–sharing is an intranet. If an intranet is not effectively managed, knowledge–sharing in an organisation shall not be augmented.Objective: To investigate whether or not an intranet augments knowledge–sharing in the selected organisation of eThekwini Municipality.Methods: In this study a quantitative research approach was adopted.Results: The results of this survey suggest that firstly the intranet appears to be at a medium maturity level; secondly, whilst there is information sharing, the intranet does not appear to be effective as a knowledge–sharing structure; and thirdly there appears to be scope for improvement of the content on the intranet. The implication thereof is that eThekwini Municipality’s recently formed Municipal Institute of Learning (MILE) may be ideally poised to address the identified shortcomings.Conclusion: Intranet technology plays an important role in an organisation by enabling the effective acquisition, sharing and presentation of knowledge. Because of this an intranet must be effectively managed to readily augment knowledge–sharing in the organisational context of local government organisations (such as metropolitan municipalities) in South Africa.

Design and Implementation of an Effective Fuzzy Logic Controller based on Quantum Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm

This paper proposes a new approach based on quantum inspired evolutionary algorithm (QIEA) for effective selection and definition of fuzzy if-then control rules as well as the shapes of membership functions (MFs) to design fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs). The majority of works done on designing FLCs rely on the knowledge base derived from imprecise heuristic knowledge of experienced operators or persons. These traditional methods, however, are cumbersome to implement and very time consuming to evaluate. Our proposed approach is a self-learning adaptive method and decomposes a problem in such a way that leads to more effective knowledge acquisition and improved control performance with the FLCs. In order to verify the effectiveness of this self-learning adaptive method, a standard test-bed, the truck backer-upper problem, is considered as the test problem. During each generation, the rules are updated and the MFs’ parameters are altered using a complementary double mutation operator (CDMO) and a discrete crossover (DC). This paper also demonstrates the effect of different fuzzification and defuzzification methods on the response of the FLC. The center of gravity (COG) and modified COG are used as defuzzifier to analyze the results of the fuzzy controller. The experimental results show that the proposed approach with different fuzzification and MCOG to design FLCs performs better than the traditional methods with triangular fuzzification and COG in terms of required time to backing up the truck.

Reframing the development of corporate learning

Due to increasing recognition by industry that partnerships with universities can lead to more effective knowledge and skills acquisition and deployment, corporate learning programmes are currently experiencing a resurgence of interest. Rethinking of corporations’ approaches to what has traditionally been classed as ‘training’ has resulted in a new focus on learning and the adoption of philosophies that underlie the academic paradigm. This paper reports on two studies of collaboration between major international engineering corporations and an Australian university, the aim of which was to up-skill the workforce in response to changing markets. The paper highlights the differences between the models of learning adopted in such collaboration and those in more conventional, university-based environments. The learning programmes combine the ADDIE (analysis, design, develop, implement and evaluate) development and workplace learning models. Adaptations that have added value for industry partners and recommendations as to how these can be evolved to cope with change are discussed. The learning is contextualised by industry- based subject matter experts working in close collaboration with university experts and learning designers to develop programmes that are reflective of current and future needs in the organisation. Results derived from user feedback indicate that the learning programmes are effectively aligned with the needs of the industry partners whilst simultaneously upholding academic ideals. In other words, it is possible to combine academic and more traditional approaches to develop corporate learning programmes that satisfy requirements in the workplace. Emerging from the study, a new conceptual framework for the development of corporate learning is presented.

Radical and incremental entrepreneurial orientation: The effect of knowledge acquisition

AbstractA firm's collaborative context can represent an important source of knowledge for sustaining its entrepreneurial outcomes. Drawing on entrepreneurship and resource-based view literature, we study how the acquisition of knowledge from inter-firm ties affects the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and performance, distinguishing between two types of knowledge, market and technological, and between two types of entrepreneurial orientation, radical and incremental. The results of the study on a sample of 203 Spanish small businesses from the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector suggest that knowledge acquisition plays different roles, depending on the type of entrepreneurial orientation developed and also on the type of knowledge exchanged. In particular, market and technological knowledge acquisition positively moderate only the relationship between radical entrepreneurial orientation and performance, while in the case of incremental entrepreneurial orientation we find only a direct positive influence of market knowledge acquisition on performance.

Radical and incremental entrepreneurial orientation: The effect of knowledge acquisition

AbstractA firm's collaborative context can represent an important source of knowledge for sustaining its entrepreneurial outcomes. Drawing on entrepreneurship and resource-based view literature, we study how the acquisition of knowledge from inter-firm ties affects the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and performance, distinguishing between two types of knowledge, market and technological, and between two types of entrepreneurial orientation, radical and incremental. The results of the study on a sample of 203 Spanish small businesses from the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector suggest that knowledge acquisition plays different roles, depending on the type of entrepreneurial orientation developed and also on the type of knowledge exchanged. In particular, market and technological knowledge acquisition positively moderate only the relationship between radical entrepreneurial orientation and performance, while in the case of incremental entrepreneurial orientation we find only a direct positive influence of market knowledge acquisition on performance.

Managing effective knowledge acquisition in outsourcing alliances: A suppliers perspective

Knowledge acquisition through international outsourcing alliances often plays a key in increasing a firm’s technology capability. However, knowledge acquisition is not an easy process, as it relates to the firm’s learning ability, the quality of the partnership, cross-national communication, and knowledge ambiguity, etc. Few studies discuss knowledge acquisition from the perspective of suppliers in newly industrialized economies, and often overlook the usefulness of information technology in the learning process. As a result, there are still some research gaps on this topic. Therefore, this study adopts the supplier point of view to explore the differences between suppliers with more or less effective knowledge acquisition. Using a sample of 204 cases of international outsourcing alliances, this study shows that learner characteristics, partnerships, and the use of information technology are the primary factors affecting supplier knowledge acquisition. This study also investigates the different learning patterns of tacit knowledge acquisition and explicit knowledge acquisition. Key words: suppliers, international outsourcing alliance, knowledge acquisition, learner characteristics, partnership, informational technology.

A Necessidade de Refletir sobre as Estratégias Pedagógicas para Atender à Aprendizagem da Geração Y

Currently, the major challenge for schools is how to work with young people increasingly involved with new technologies, bombarded by calls from the media, fascinated by the internet and manipulated by the power of consumer society. These young people, who mostly belong to the Y Generation, have grown up in a relatively stable world under the great influence of the technological mechanisms. They have gained self-esteem and do not bow to activities that do not make sense in the long term. They know how to network and deal with authorities as if they were classmates. They have much information, but have not been able to transform this information into social constructions that serve interests other than solely their own. The gap both between students and teachers and also between the educational process implemented by most schools and the effective acquisition of knowledge is enormous. Increasingly, the disinterest and lack of involvement of the youth in the study is the subject of educational meetings and conversations among teachers. It is understandable that educators are emotionally worn out and discouraged, because in recent times they have been undertaking real battles to get students' attention in class. We need to review teaching strategies and rethink the role of the teacher. It is necessary and urgent to establish a link between students and teachers so that learning can indeed happen.

Medical knowledge management for specific hospital departments

Medical knowledge representation and management is concerned with how to organise the often vague clinical experience of medical staff required for computable models. However, few knowledge management and acquisition tools have entered routine use, since such tools are not perceived by physicians as part of the clinical information process. An attempt to partially solve this problem, we identify two key aspects of knowledge representation and management tasks. The first is to adopt a medical knowledge standardisation to provide a consistent terminology control and to simplify the integration between knowledge management tools and the health information system. The second is to establish an effective knowledge acquisition process in specific medical fields by adapting knowledge acquisition tools. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to define computational models and to design mechanisms for the effective acquisition and management of medical knowledge in real-life hospital departments. To this end, we analyse the representation of medical knowledge (based on deep-causal models) and the development of knowledge management tools (based on ontologies), integrated within the information processing activities of the clinical user. Finally, we illustrate its applicability in the Intensive Care Unit and Pediatry scenarios.

Why aren't we learning from our partners? An investigation on the relationship between initial conditions and knowledge acquisition effectiveness

Although the theoretical literature has been favourable regarding the benefits of alliances, the empirical literature has been less clear. In part, we argue that this is because the literature generally ignores the initial organisational conditions of the firms before engaging in such activities. To address this issue, we designed a survey research to study the impact of initial product innovation conditions on the inter-firm networking patterns of entrepreneurial firms. We tested our hypotheses on small and medium biotechnology and IC design firms in the USA and Taiwan. The results suggest that inter-firm alliances serve as an effective platform of external knowledge acquisition when the knowledge recipients are strongly committed to the knowledge acquisition process. However, the efforts to acquire external knowledge are usually diluted as the size of the focal firm's inter-firm network increases. Such dilution effect reduces the effectiveness of external knowledge acquisition from external partners.

Influence of Tie Strength and Behavioural Factors on Effective Knowledge Acquisition: A Study of Korean New Product Alliances

We investigate the influence of tie strength and the mediating effect of behavioural factors on knowledge acquisition in new product development alliances in the Korean machinery and electronics industries. Tie strength on the operational level, as measured by interaction intensity and intimacy between partners' project managers, was found to enhance knowledge acquisition, whereas the depth and length of firm-level ties did not. Moreover, the influence of interaction intensity and intimacy on knowledge acquisition was mediated by communication quality and fairness, suggesting that operational-level tie strength becomes less relevant for knowledge acquisition when good communication and perceptions of fairness between alliance partners have been established. Taken together, when knowledge acquisition is the objective, behavioural factors seem to play a more prominent role than tie strength in Korean new product alliances.

The Practical Relevance of Accountability Systems for School Improvement: A Descriptive Analysis of California Schools

In search for the practical relevance of accountability systems for school improvement, the authors ask whether practitioners traveling between the worlds of system-designated high- and low-performing schools would detect tangible differences in educational quality and organizational effectiveness. In comparing nine exceptionally high and low performing California middle schools, the authors conclude that if such travelers expected to encounter visible signs of an overall higher quality of students’ educational experience at the high-performing schools, they would be disappointed. Rather, they would have to settle on a narrower definition of quality that is more proximate to the effective acquisition of standards-aligned and test-relevant knowledge. High-growth schools tended to generate internal commitment for accountability and consider it an impetus for raising standards.

A NEW APPROACH FOR THE INCREMENTAL DEVELOPMENT OF RETRIEVAL FUNCTIONS FOR CBR

We present a new approach to the effective development of complex retrieval components for case-based reasoning systems (CBR). Our approach goes beyond the traditional CBR approach by allowing an incremental refinement of an existing retrieval knowledge base during routine use of the system. The refinement takes place through a direct expert-system interaction while the expert is accomplishing their given tasks. We lend ideas from ripple-down rules (RDR), a proven method for the very effective and efficient acquisition of classification knowledge during the routine use of a knowledge-based system (KBS). In our approach the expert is only required to provide explanations of why, for a given problem, a certain case should be retrieved. Incrementally a complex retrieval knowledge base as a composition of many simple retrieval functions is developed. This approach is effective with respect to both the development of highly tailored and complex retrieval knowledge bases for CBR as well as providing an intuitive and feasible approach for the expert. The approach has been implemented in our CBR system MIKAS (Menu construction using an Incremental Knowledge Acquisition System) that allows to automatically construct a menu that is strongly tailored to the individual requirements and food preferences of a client.

Buying Knowledge: Effective Acquisition of External Knowledge

Buying Knowledge: Effective Acquisition of External Knowledge

Breaking the Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck Through Conversational Knowledge Management

Much of today’s organizational knowledge still exists outside of formal information repositories and often only in people’s heads. While organizations are eager to capture this knowledge, existing acquisition methods are not up to the task. Neither traditional artificial intelligence-based approaches nor more recent, less-structured knowledge management techniques have overcome the knowledge acquisition challenges. This article investigates knowledge acquisition bottlenecks and proposes the use of collaborative, conversational knowledge management to remove them. The article demonstrates the opportunity for more effective knowledge acquisition through the application of the principles of Bazaar style, open-source development. The article introduces wikis as software that enables this type of knowledge acquisition. It empirically analyzes the Wikipedia to produce evidence for the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Book Review: Buying Knowledge: Effective Acquisition of External Knowledge

Book Review: Buying Knowledge: Effective Acquisition of External Knowledge

Buying Knowledge: Effective Acquisition of External Knowledge

Buying Knowledge: Effective Acquisition of External Knowledge

VidaMine: a visual data mining environment

That the already vast and ever-increasing amounts of data still do present formidable challenges to effective and efficient acquisition of knowledge is by no means an exaggeration. The knowledge discovery process entails more than just the application of data mining strategies. There are many other aspects including, but not limited to: planning, data pre-processing, data integration, evaluation and presentation. The human-vision channel is capable of recognizing and understanding data at an instant. Effective visual strategies can be used to tap the outstanding human visual channel in extracting useful information from data. Unlike is the case with most research efforts, the exploitation should be employed not just at the beginning or at the end of the knowledge discovery process but across the entire discovery process. In essence, this calls for the development of an effective user/visual component, the development of an overall framework that can support the entire discovery process/all discovery phases, and the strategic placement of the visual component in that framework. Key issues of this component will be the open architecture, allowing extensions and adaptations to specific mining environments, and the precise semantics and syntax, allowing an optimal integration between the presentation and the computation.

Conceptual modeling for configuration of mass-customizable products

The development and maintenance of product configuration systems is faced with increasing challenges caused by the growing complexity of the underlying knowledge bases. Effective knowledge acquisition is needed since the product and the corresponding configuration system have to be developed in parallel. In this paper, we show how to employ a standard design language (Unified Modeling Language, UML) for modeling configuration knowledge bases. The two constituent parts of the configuration model are the component model and a set of corresponding functional architectures defining which requirements can be imposed on the product. The conceptual configuration model is automatically translated into an executable logic representation. Using this representation we show how to employ model-based diagnosis techniques for debugging faulty configuration knowledge bases, detecting infeasible requirements, and for reconfiguring old configurations.

Learning Through Joint Ventures: A Framework Of Knowledge Acquisition

Joint ventures (JVs) are becoming an increasingly important organizational form in international business. When JVs are formed, valuable learning opportunities may be created for the venture partners. The primary objective in this paper is to explore the conditions under which firms exploit JV learning opportunities through the acquisition of knowledge. A framework of knowledge acquisition by JV partner firms is proposed. Using JV partner organizations as the primary level of analysis, the paper identifies various factors that influence the acquisition of learning, its value to the learning organization, and the migration of knowledge from the JV to the parent. Two firm specific learning‐based concepts are developed: alliance knowledge accessibility and knowledge acquisition effectiveness.