Extending Nonaka’s Knowledge Creation Theory: How We Know More than We Can Tell & Tell More than We Can Know

Nonaka and colleagues propose a theory of knowledge creation grounded in the epistemology of Michael Polanyi. However, both Nonaka (and colleagues) and Polanyi tend to leave part of the epistemology of collaborative knowledge creation unaccounted for. As a remedy we introduce the notion of knowledge as “unfathomable” (Bartley, 1987), rooted in the Popperian idea of “objective knowledge” (Popper, 1972). Once created, such knowledge has something of a life of its own, pregnant with possibilities for further development and use – to be explored collaboratively in marketlike processes. In a sense we may thus “tell more than we can know” (Lindkvist, 2005). While the Polanyi (1966) maxim “we know more than we can tell” has intrigued Nonaka to consider how we could convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, this complementary maxim points more clearly to the potential for future use that follow from knowledge‟s own unfathomable dynamic. Finally, we outline how the epistemological maxims of saying „less‟ and „more‟ than we can know, complement each other and suggest a summarizing „knowledge generator‟ model.