1.4. Grafting
Organizations frequently increase their store of knowledge by acquiring and
grafting on new members who possess knowledge not previously available within the
organization. Sometimes grafting-on of carriers of new knowledge is done on a
large-scale basis, as in the case of an acquisition of a whole organization by another.
A well-known example is General Motors' acquisition of Ross Perot's corporation,
EDS, in order to obtain the information systems expertise possessed by EDS. For
acquiring complex forms of information or knowledge, grafting is often faster than
acquisition through experience and more complete than acquisition through imitation.
Empirical studies of knowledge acquisition through grafting are scarce, but see
Lyle's (1988) examination of knowledge acquisition through joint ventures. The work
of Jemison and Sitkin (1986a, b) on the necessity of attending to the process
dimension of mergers is relevant and perhaps indicative of the type of work that will
be useful in the future. We can expect that, as the rate at which organizations must
assimilate new knowledge continues to increase (Huber 1984; Drucker 1988), grafting
will become a more frequently used approach for organizations to acquire quickly
knowledge that is new to them.
The last of the five information acquisition processes to be discussed is learning by
searching or noticing. The literature seems to indicate that searching is the process
most consciously pursued by managers on a day-to-day basis.