ABSTRACT
In the currently emerging knowledge society, knowledge is seen as the most important success factor for industrial enterprises. Just as manufacturing technologies are extremely important during the industrial age, knowledge creation, knowledge management, and organizational innovations play the pivotal role in future businesses (Drucker, 1993). Therefore, the construction of novel knowledge as well as its efficient utilization and distribution is the most decisive factors for maintaining or achieving the leading edge in successful markets. Under these circumstances, it makes perfect sense to talk about successful products as being the coordinated and reified knowledge of some business enterprise. In an environment where markets are shifting, technology proliferating, competitiors multiplying, and products becoming obsolete overnight (cf. Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), we certainly also have a worry—whether the various techniques for cognitive task analyses that have been developed and successfully applied over the last 20 years will, by themselves, be sufficient for mastering the demands of the emerging knowledge society or whether additional progress is indeed required.
