Cellular Automaton and Tacit Knowledge Sharing

With the advent of the knowledge economy era, knowledge has become the major source for an organization to gain its core competence, and the full absorption and utilization of knowledge resources outside the organization are the key to increasing productivity and gaining a competitive advantage. An organization’s knowledge stocks determine its core competitiveness directly. Polanyi (2015) divides knowledge into two types, explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge, while Allee (1997) analogizes tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge to oceans and icebergs, respectively. In a traditional economic society, people only give credit to the role of explicit knowledge and focus on the management and utilization of themselves in their daily work. As a matter of fact, explicit knowledge is merely the “iceberg” above the water. With the advent of the knowledge economic society, people have started to draw attention to the enormous tacit knowledge under the water. Polanyi (2015) points out that in modern industries, knowledge is hard to describe as an indispensable part of technologies, thus making the sharing of tacit knowledge hard to codify as an essential component of knowledge sharing. The formation of tacit knowledge is a long-term accumulation process of personal experience, insights, and deep comprehension, which are extremely difficult to imitate and steal; therefore, tacit knowledge is the basis and source for an organization to build up its core competitiveness. Knowledge possesses abstractness and externality, which makes it possible to share, i.e., knowledge’s externalities allow it to be shared at a low cost, and the more it is shared, the more valuable it becomes; on the other hand, such qualities of knowledge serve also as the obstacles to knowledge sharing. More specifically, the high cost, high risk, and uncertainty of income distributions of the knowledge innovation processes determine knowledge owners’ monopolistic attitudes toward knowledge out of their own selfishness and needs for competition, which deter the dissemination and spreading of knowledge.