Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Intellectual ...

Table 1: Stages <strong>of</strong> reviewed knowledge life cycles
KLCs McElroy
(2003)
Stages Individual and
group learning
Knowledge
claim
formulation
Information
acquisition
Knowledge
validation
Knowledge
integration
Jashapara
(2004)
Discovering
Knowledge
Generating
Knowledge
Evaluating
Knowledge
Sharing
Knowledge
Leveraging
Knowledge
Maksim Maksimovic et al
KLCs in KM KLCs in KBE
Buckowitz and
Williams
(1999)
Get Capture
and/or
Creation
Use Sharing and
Dissemination
Learn Acquisition
and
Application
Dalkir (2005) Rodriguez and
Al-Ashaab
(2007)
Stokes
(2001)
MOKA
Identify Identify
Capture and
Standardise
Justify
Represent Capture
Contribute Implement Formalize
Assess Use Package
Build and
Sustain
Divest
Activate
Organisational Learning is seen by Mc Elroy (1999), Jashapara (2004) and Dalkir (2005) as <strong>the</strong>
process which results in knowledge creation or production. The issue <strong>of</strong> a learning organisation is
also important in lean product development. Morgan and Liker (2006) describe Toyota as a learning
network which develops ways to collect, share and apply knowledge in <strong>the</strong> entire enterprise.
The stages related to knowledge capturing are mainly concerned with <strong>the</strong> capturing <strong>of</strong> explicit
knowledge suggesting techniques such as templates (Bukowitz and Williams, 1999; Dalkir, 2005;
Stokes, 2001) or cognitive mapping tools (Jashapara, 2004). However, <strong>the</strong> idnustrial field study
indicated that in fact, tacit knowledge was rated <strong>the</strong> most important knowledge source in product
development. This results in a big challenge to express <strong>the</strong> inexpressible (Nonaka, 1991) with regards
to knowledge capturing. In this case <strong>the</strong> use <strong>of</strong> figurative language, such as mindscaping (Bukowitz
and Williams, 1999; Jashapara, 2004), could potentially be considered in product development. In
addition <strong>the</strong> literature in lean product development addresses <strong>the</strong> need <strong>of</strong> easy to use visualisation
techniques such as A3 templates and trade-<strong>of</strong>f curves (Kennedy, 2008).
The principle <strong>of</strong> communities <strong>of</strong> practice is regarded to be essential for knowledge sharing (McElroy,
1999; Bukowitz and Williams, 1999; Jashapara, 2004; Dalkir, 2005). In Toyota, as described by
Morgan and Liker (2006), cross functional knowledge sharing is well established, meaning that
knowledge can be retrieved from a seamlessly integrated and centralised know-how database.
In <strong>the</strong> industrial field study 78% <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> interviewed engineers stated that knowledge capture is very
time consuming. Also, 78% <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> interviewed engineers find it difficult to extract already captured
knowledge and 52% expressed that unnecessary knowledge is captured throughout <strong>the</strong> product
development process. The authors are convinced that any solution developed has to address <strong>the</strong> fact
that engineers are not willing to spend time on documentation, which outlines <strong>the</strong> necessity <strong>of</strong> an
integrated solution in <strong>the</strong> day to day tasks <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> product development engineer. In general <strong>the</strong>
industrial filed study showed that KLC activities are not well established in product development. In
addition, <strong>the</strong> literature related to KLC and lean product development lack <strong>of</strong> supporting tools that can
be adopted and used in product development. As a consequence, <strong>the</strong> LeanKLC, as presented in <strong>the</strong>
next section, was developed as a methodology to capture, re-use and create knowledge in a
LeanPPD environment.
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