Three Tales of Knowledge-Creating Companies

User Orientation Through Experience: A Study of Hobbyist Knowing in Product Development

“…This does not inevitably mean that having users on the design team is a better way to understand the use context of a product than using design methods or involving lead users into the design process, because hobbyist knowing can sometimes be too one-sided to fully understand the diversity of the context of use. The stickiness of hobbyist knowing means that hobbyist knowing is difficult to transfer (von Hippel 1995) and it is more than its current externalization-the transformation from tacit to explicit (Nonaka, 1991;Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995;Nonaka et al, 1998). I would argue that hobbyist knowing covers areas that escape current user research methods and documentation and remain at the margins of consciousness although would be shared by hobbyists within their work practices.…”

“…It is an alertness and sensitivity within a social and material context (Schön, 1991), a knowing and doing together (Lave & Wenger, 1991;Wenger, 1998;Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002), and a stepping over and over again into the situations of use of a product (Schön, 1991;Suchman, 1987). Hobbyist knowing is difficult to communicate because it is embodied and embedded in action (Blackler et al, 1998;Carlile, 2002;Schön, 1991) but, at its best, it is interwoven into the product development process (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995;Nonaka et al, 1998) as a generative and creative resource of sensemaking (Weick, 1995) within an organization. Hobbyist knowing is thus defined as a type of knowledge-or rather a type of knowing-that emphasizes its active and long-term nature.…”

“…Therefore I draw on a variety of theoretical resources to conceptualize the role of users within the product development team and the nature of their knowledge. Nonaka's (1991, Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995Nonaka, Umemoto, & Sasaki, 1998) approach helps to understand different aspects of knowledge embedded in the product development process, and the dynamics between tacit and explicit knowledge in an organization. Tacit knowledge is highly personal, hard to formalize, and therefore difficult to communicate to others.…”

Support for document revision in an organization using the association rule

“…In recent research on knowledge management [9,10], informal information like little memos, which was not previously used in organizations, was indicated as being a type of organizational information which is beneficial for the transmission of know-how [11,12]. The revision data which is the subject of this paper is also data which has been little used by entire organizations, and inherent in this data are the high-level revisions based on the revisers' many years of experience.…”

“…With these rules, a user attains instructions relating to notation, sentence meanings, and grammar, and also instructions based on organizational information. However, rule8, rule 9 , and rule 10 from the second line onward include actual extracted rules; generally, these are a single revision expressed with multiple rules. Also, in some cases, organizational information is not transmitted to the user receiving the revision instructions.…”