Corporate Information Network (COIN): The Fraunhofer IESE Experience Factory

Experience-based continuous learning is essential for improving products, processes, and technologies in emerging as well as established areas of business and engineering science. It can be facilitated by casebased organizational learning, meaning that relevant experience is captured in the form of cases for reuse in a corporate experience repository. For obvious reasons, learning from experience needs to be a permanent endeavor. Thus, an organization has to handle a “continuous stream of experience.” For this purpose, an “Experience Factory” was established at Fraunhofer IESE, with the COIN initiative. The objectives of COIN are to provide users with valuable information/knowledge at the right time, in an adequate representation, and within the actual context (“just-in-time”).