5.3 A NSWERING RESEARCH QUESTION : DEFINITION OF INTERNAL SUB PROCESSES
5.3.1 Building the awareness of a transferable knowledge
A potential reuser has to be aware of some knowledge if he ever wants to transfer it.
However, one may have more troubles to explain how this awareness is developed.
The first step of this process is the establishment by the potential reuser of the most essential part of information he can get about any knowledge: the awareness of its existence. Without that part, it would be impossible for him to learn more about the transferable knowledge. For instance, in Critical Incident 15, Mr. Pihéry was looking at some catalogues when he spotted a new technology. It was using a laser to position cylinders in the production line. At that very time, he knew nothing about that technology aside from its existence. Yet, this event marked the beginning of an awareness process that led him to fully discover and understand the laser technology before deciding its transfer.
Of course, knowing that some transferable knowledge exists is not enough for a potential reuser to choose to reuse it. Building the awareness of some transferable knowledge also means gathering some information about it. This help the potential reuser answer any relevant question concerning the transferable knowledge: what is it? Where is it? In whom or in what is it embedded? What is it for? Why has it been created? How can it be used? And so on...
Hence, only a potential reuser who is able to answer all these questions could affirm he possesses an acceptable awareness of the transferable knowledge.
Some of the questions displayed before made us propose that the development of awareness of a source described by Le Van (2006) was actually included in that category. Indeed,
knowing the source of some transferable knowledge is part of the numerous details a potential reuser can gather about some knowledge.
The awareness of a transferable knowledge is mostly built through meeting, research or enquiries. For instance, newspapers companies are often courted by furnishers. Their employees have thereby opportunities to discover new technologies and knowledge. That is what Mr. Jourdin experienced in Critical Incident 10.
The technological monitoring is also an important source of fresh knowledge, as presented in Critical Incident 5. Over a convention in Moscow, Mr. Leduc attended a presentation during which he discovered how an Irish newspaper company had externalised numerous activities.
The processes used by the Irish company to do so interested him. As we can see above, organisation members doing technological monitoring are often going to industrial shows or surfing on the Internet. It helps them being aware of the evolutions in various domains. They do not answer a specific need. Instead, they are watching what similar companies are experiencing or talking with colleagues. It improves their culture and can help them later when they are confronted to a new problem: it also gives them maturity for the future decisions.
Finally, the awareness of the transferable knowledge is built through personal investigations.
If a potential reuser hears of new interesting knowledge, he may go on the field to figure it by himself and to gather some information about it. For instance, in Critical Incident 4, Mr Leduc decided to visit a Finnish company. Indeed, he wanted to see how it kept its subscribers informed and which tools the company used when it wanted them to react.
We presented what the awareness of a transferable knowledge was and how it was built. Yet,
transferred). When, in Critical Incident 9, Mr. Jourdin went to LE DAUPHINE’s headquarters to see how they had managed a project, he gathered much information about it. Yet, even with that knowledge, he did not possess the technology related to this project at that time. All the knowledge gathered during the awareness phase was somehow related to the transferable knowledge (the technology transferred later) but was definitively not it.
So, as illustrated by that example, the knowledge gathered during the development of this category is essentially metaknowledge about the transferable knowledge. Of course, it isn’t sufficient to fill directly the gap that asks for a knowledge transfer. Instead, it provides information about the transferable knowledge to the potential reuser. So that he can decide if a transfer is relevant. It gives the potential reuser a clear idea of what he could achieve if he received the discussed knowledge. Majchrzak et al (2004) introduced this concept of metaknowledge in their research but didn’t really look into it. We thought we should go deeper in that direction, which will be done later in this thesis.
As a conclusion, we remarked that the present category contained a slightly higher percentage of data than its counterparts. The awareness is the process during which some knowledge is discovered and evaluated through the accumulated information about it. So, this distribution seemed logical to us since this category definition was strongly related to the core of the studied process. Therefore, the interviewees were more likely to talk of events contained in this category. Yet, this is only speculation since there wasn’t enough data to prove something statistically.
To sum up, for a potential reuser, building the awareness of some transferable knowledge is close to the awareness often mentioned in the literature. It is about discovering the existence of potentially transferable knowledge and gathering metaknowledge about it. So, a potential user will not be likely to transfer some knowledge until he has built a serious awareness of it.
Acquisition of metaknowledge about a transferrable knowledge
Good awareness of a transferrable knowledge No awareness of a
transferrable knowledge
Awareness of the transferrable knowledge’s existence
Figure 5.1 : Awareness of a transferrable knowledge
However, the critical behaviours and events we collected were not all related to the building of the awareness of a transferable knowledge. We discovered that other kinds of structures were developed through the awareness process and were necessary for a transfer to occur.
One of them was the awareness of a need.