ABSTRACT

The issue of religion and spirituality too has a bearing on knowledge creation, both from a culture and values perspective as well as from the angle of strong religious belief. In this chapter, the author focuses a lot on their works, which have been picked up and developed further by other contributors. She dwells on knowledge creation in Japanese companies, drawing mostly on the works of Nonaka and Takeuchi and their compatriots, which work has had a ground-breaking effect in the knowledge creation arena. Intra-organisationally, knowledge made real can trigger a new cycle of knowledge creation, expanding horizontally and vertically across the organisation. Inter-organisationally, knowledge created by the organisation can mobilise knowledge of affiliated companies, customers, suppliers, competitors and others outside the company, through dynamic interaction. The interaction of tacit and explicit knowledge (knowledge conversion) gave rise to four modes: socialisation (from tacit to tacit), externalisation, combination (from explicit to explicit), and internalisation, now known as the SECI model.