Company Know-how and New Knowledge and Design
In their book, The Knowledge Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi maintain,
“the new product development process happens to be the core for creating new
organisational knowledge”.
Organisational knowledge can be described as:
· The deep knowledge that provides an organisation with core capabilities, in other words,
know-how.
· The processes that provide for, “the way we do things round here”.
· The selective absorption of new things from the external environment that feeds into a
value system.
If we now consider the many ways that a company might use design we will be able to see
more clearly the sense of the Nonaka and Takeuchi statement. The following list is fairly
comprehensive:
· To repackage existing brands
· To restyle existing products
· To ensure functionality in user interfaces
· To reduce component complexity
· To generate radical applications for technology
· To imagine future products and markets
· To evolve manufacturing processes
· To create prototypes for testing
As we undertake any or all of these things we create a good deal of new knowledge. Some of
this knowledge gets codified while the rest is tacitly held knowledge that is almost impossible
to document or put into a database. Nevertheless, we must understand that both filter into and
around the company.