The effects of duplication or redundancy serve to further integrate these two types of knowledge, yet it does much more than that: it transforms trust into an accelerator of shared knowledge throughout an organization. This is especially evident from analyzing how Toyota encourages its suppliers to collaborate with one another, sharing best practices in managing the many aspects of the Toyota order management, order quantity management and supplier management workflows, as all must be completely integrated to before they can fulfill their first order from the auto company (Dyer, Nobeoka, etl.al.). What Toyota is doing by enforcing such a high level of cooperation and collaboration is ensuring that the connections between suppliers at the process and worker level are so strong that tacit and explicit knowledge will flow freely. What Toyota is after is not necessarily pricing performance gains or time-to-market; they are after transforming knowledge into their greatest competitive strength (Dyer, Nobeoka, 301). The greater the level of trust across suppliers, or in a broader context, a network, the greater the knowledge sharing, both tacit and explicit, and realizing this can take time to develop, Toyota places the "fast track" at 1 year (Dyer, Nobeoka, et.al). This is comparable to the timeframes Nonaka mentions (et.al.) of the Matsushita study of software engineer Ikuko Tanaka studying the ways bakers stretched the dough and kneaded it. Tacit knowledge capture takes consistent time and focus commitment.
Conclusion
The implications for Human Resource Departments looking to create more knowledge-generating areas of their organizations are clear. First, there needs to be a commitment on the part of management to invest the time necessary to capture tacit knowledge...
Second, organizational structures need to encourage and promote redundancy and cross-functional sharing of knowledge (Nanaka, 168) so trust eventually becomes an accelerator of tacit and explicit knowledge transfer (Dyer, Nobeoka, et.al). The SECI Model as defined by Nanaka (Li, Gao, et.al.) defines how organizations can be transformed to create knowledge as a core competitive strength. Compared to other models, the SECI Model promotes greater levels of collaboration based on mutual exchange of ideas leading to trust. The SECI Model becomes a catalyst of transforming tacit and explicit knowledge into a competitive advantage by also enabling greater levels of trust, which serves to accelerate the model over time.
Appendix A:
The SECI Model
Source: (Li, Gao, 6 -- 14)
References
Anand, G., P. Ward, and M. Tatikonda. "Role of explicit and tacit knowledge in Six Sigma projects: An empirical examination of differential project success." Journal of Operations Management 28.4 (2010): 303.
Jeffrey H. Dyer and Kentaro Nobeoka. "Creating and managing a high-performance knowledge-sharing network: The Toyota case " Strategic Management Journal: Special Issue: Strategic Networks 21.3 (2000): 341-345.
Meng Li and Fei Gao. "Why Nonaka highlights tacit knowledge: A critical review. " Journal of Knowledge Management 7.4 (2003): 6-14.
(Nonaka, 162 -- 171)
Ikujiro Nonaka. "The Knowledge-Creating Company. " Harvard Business Review 1 Jul 2007
Oguz, F. "Hayek on tacit knowledge." Journal of Institutional Economics 6.2 (2010): 145-165.
Stefan Stern. "Why there is more to motivation than carrots and sticks. "…
