MATURE Deliverable 1. - Knowledge Maturing

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Figure 13: Dimensions of knowledge maturing
• The knowledge dimension refers to knowledge in a narrow sense, i.e., domain knowledge in a
non-tangible form, including “know-what” and “know-how”. Knowledge in this understanding is
always bound to people’s minds – everything beyond that is an abstraction. This dimension
represents the main domain described with the first maturing model where knowledge was
understood differently on the individual and the collective level:
o Individual level. On an individual level, we follow the assumption that knowledge is
bound to individuals’ minds and their structures. The process of augmenting and
changing that knowledge is what is usually called (individual) learning processes. There
are manifold forms of learning and their adequacy depends on the type of knowledge, the
individual, and the situation at hand. One special form of learning (which is often not
explicitly considered as learning) here is also the alignment to the understanding of others
of the same real-world phenomenon.
o Collective level. The collective knowledge level is an abstraction if we “zoom out” from
an individual to a (larger) group of people. From this meso and macro perspectives 7 , we
can speak of collective knowledge as an aggregation of individual pieces of knowledge.
From this meso- or macro-level, we can (despite the fuzziness of aggregation) see if an
individual learning process contributes to an advancement of the collective knowledge
level, which is what we call knowledge maturing. While learning at an individual level
is always the prerequisite for any advancement on the collective level, there is a
fundamental difference if an individual just learns what others have learnt before (e.g.,
like a pupil at school) or if this learning is an active construction process that advances
knowledge on a higher level. We call this “higher level” the collective level. This has a
quality of its own while still acknowledging that it is an abstraction from the sum of
individual knowledge. This also corresponds to the notion of a shared understanding of a
collective. Such a collective does not necessarily refer to a global level, but can also refer
to smaller collectives like an organisation (macro level) or a team (meso level).
Development on this collective is what knowledge maturing in its narrower sense is
referring to.
7 Depending on the size of the organisational unit (macro stands for the entire organisation, e.g., a company,
whereas meso denotes any organisational level within, e.g., a work group, a project or a department.