Knowledge Creation In Organizations: Proposition For A New Model

This study has been set against the backdrop of an increasingly changing business world where innovative competencies are recognized to be important for sustained performance and firm survival. Study of innovations, however, point to upfront problems in the lack of satisfactory explanation as how new knowledge is created in the first place. Nonaka and Takeuchi's SECI description as the leading model of knowledge creation in firms has been critiqued to be incomplete and in being specific to the study context that may not fully represent knowledge creation in other cultures. In this respect, the setting of this research in the Indian context provides the view of how firms in other contexts create knowledge. Using the interpretive approach to study emergence of new knowledge, a modified model of knowledge creation was developed by identifying processes of knowledge creation through setting of events longitudinally. The processes of the model (called as the 4E model) have been identified as enactment, experimentation, embedment and enculturation that are set in the background of organizational descriptors in terms of the local community and the activity, in which it is engaged.