CZ:Cold Storage/Knowledge creation

Basic Definition

Knowledge creation is simply creating new knowledge. New knowledge is knowledge that never existed before anywhere in the world. This means that no one on earth has this knowledge in storage in the human brain or in a computer. This includes both individual minds and the global brain.

New knowledge is created by individuals, not by society as a whole. These individuals might be working in or contributing to social groups, but individuals create this knowledge and deliver it to larger social groups and ultimately to society itself.

Three Steps

There are three necessary steps to incorporation of new knowledge into society:

1. An individual(s) creates and stores knowledge in his or her mind or computer system.

2. The individual expresses this knowledge to society.

3. Society accepts the new knowledge and stores it in the social mind or social systems.

When an individual creates new knowledge, he or she has a choice on whether or not to deliver this new knowledge to society for social acceptance. New knowledge can be created and stored, for example, in the individual mind and never 'expressed' to society as a whole. As another example, society might reject perfectly logical new knowledge for political or social reasons. All three steps must occur for society to advance. If you've ever asked the question "What is Social Advance?," the answer is the continuing operation of the three steps listed above.

The Tacit Knowledge Fallacy and the Question

Michael Polanyi popularized the term tacit knowledge with his saying "We know more than we can tell." Polanyi concluded that there was a kind of knowledge that preceeded logic that was difficult to express.

In reality, all knowledge is explicit, logical and structured. We know this because everything we know can be categorized. If categories are not clear, logic is not clear, and the knowledge is questionable. If categories are not clear, we don't know what we think we do.

What Polanyi was expressing really should have been termed areas of question. A question is a perceived lack of knowledge structure. Questions exist in an antithetical, yin and yang structural relationship to knowledge. They call attention to any lack of logical structure, anywhere in the social knowledge base.

Questions exist individually and collectively. Collective areas of question are equivalent to what Polanyi called tacit knowledge. All knowledge is explicit and can be easily expressed. It is only when knowledge is mixed with questions that it is 'fuzzy' and difficult to express.

The Knowledge Creation Cycle

Knowledge creation is the conversion of questions or fields of question into knowledge structure. This process is cyclical and consists of five basic steps:

1. Definition/Solution/Structure (Knowledge Context).

2. Question/Problem.

3. Logical Operation (connects/structures/defines).

4. Result: Advanced Definition/Solution/Structure.

5. Return to step 1.

Knowledge creation is additive and as such new knowledge is built upon existing knowledge context. Expertise in a given area is therefore required to create new knowledge. All knowledge is created by this cyclical process and this 'knowledge context' is in turn vulnerable to this process as soon as it is created.

Confusion of Terms

Terms like genius, creativity, innovation, creative problem solving, and knowledge creation have been historically studied and represented as loosely related topics. When appropriately understood, all of these terms describe, or are components of, the knowledge creation cycle outlined above.

For example, a genius is a person that is skilled in knowledge creation, not an intellectual alone. As another example, innovation is used to describe knowledge creation in both science and business.

Knowledge vs. Knowledge Products

Knowledge is not products, but products do require knowledge to produce them. Industry is the 'science of making things.' In industry, we make new products (and services) from knowledge capital by designing, prototyping, testing, and manufacturing these products.

Knowledge is needed to create products, but again, these products are not equal to knowledge and products are not required to create new knowledge.