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In today's business world, knowledge is shaped in corporate relationships and diffused in networks. A major mode of knowledge is the tacit dimension, which refers to the elusive, uncodified knowledge that comes from experience, is hard to quantify, but gives an all-important mood and tone to explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is traditionally viewed as an important though hazily conceived organizational asset; however, here it is treated as something that is co-created in cross-cultural business relationships and as a knowledge resource of immense significance. Tacit knowledge is prone to serious misappreciation by managers, but understanding it for what it is can give firms a key edge that the authors term knowledge advantage. Here, they use case-study data from four international firms to introduce a model that makes use of the concepts of tacit corridors and coupling. Tacit corridors are the metaphorical spaces in cross-cultural interactions where managers' thoughts and actions are constrained—often inexplicably—by uncertainty and imperfect sense-making. Coupling is the process of reflexivity-based action for facilitating knowledge flows connecting individuals, organizations, and networks. Knowledge advantage is the art of mastering tacit corridors through the context-sensitive application of coupling. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Executive Overview For more than two decades Japan has ranked as a market of unusual complexity. Japan's distribution system permanently baffles; negotiation is as if with alien beings; its long-term approach to business disconcerts; choosing market intermediaries is an art in itself, while securing a business foothold and market presence entails massive costs. Prescriptions for how to do business with Japan are largely the same that dominated Western thinking in the 1980s, as if Japan has not moved on. If our company had applied the conventional thinking, our strategy for entering the Japanese market would have floundered. But we refused to follow the standard wisdom. We proceeded on the assumption that our best chance lay in a novel approach: we would co-create the market with our Japanese business partners through a synergistic process of knowledge sharing. In its planning and implementation our strategy turned on its head much accepted marketing wisdom. Perhaps most strikingly we learned that it is po...

Nonaka and Takeuchi’s book The Knowledge Creating Company is one of the most influential in the field of knowledge management. The famous SECI Model, representing the four modes of knowledge creation (socialization, externalization, combination and internalization) seems to have been accepted by the knowledge management community as universally valid in conception and in application. This paper argues that the model must be seen first and foremost as a product of the environment from which it emerged, namely Japan. It is contended that each of the four modes can only be understood with reference to their embeddedness in Japanese social and organizational culture and related value systems. Thus the model should be used with caution. It should be seen as a map rather than a model; or perhaps as a special kind of mirror, which allows us to see ourselves and our knowledge management practices in new ways for directing change. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A professor and practitioner join forces to examine the nature of tacit knowledge in cross-cultural interactions, discussing the outcome with reference to their forthcoming book with case studies on Danish, Japanese and Chinese companies. Their starting point of is that tacit knowledge, which is both elusive, yet context-specific, is crossed-culturally created at all manner of interfaces, and acts a as a subliminal influence on relationships, whilst language and cultural factors 'shape' this knowledge. It is argued that firms which have astute understandings of cross-culturally generated knowledge as a valuable resource gain in what the author's term 'knowledge advantage.'