The four bullet points under “Creation” refer to Nonaka’s (1994) four modes of knowledge
creation – socialization (the conversion of tacit knowledge to new tacit knowledge through social
interactions and shared experiences), combination (creating new explicit knowledge by merging categorizing, and synthesizing existing explicit knowledge), externalization (converting tacit
knowledge to new explicit knowledge) and internalization (the creation of new tacit knowledge
from explicit knowledge). Illustrative of these four modes respectively are apprenticeships, literature
survey reports, “lessons learned” repositories and individual or group learning through
discussions.