A stairway to success in innovation
Unlocking the mysteries of innovation
A stairway to success in innovation
NorwAI’s work package for building an AI Innovation Ecosystem is stepping up its work by inviting associate NTNU professor Nhien Nguyen to introduce activities for knowledge creation to stimulate innovation. Nguyen works at the Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management. She is also a senior researcher at Nordland Research Institute in Bodø.
- We want to unleash the power of innovation. To do so, it is not enough to study reports, guidelines, and manuals. That is just the tip of the knowledge iceberg, she says.
- No, we want to tap into people’s skills, their thinking, their experience, their competence, and their expertise. These are examples of tacit knowledge that everyone carries with them, says Nhien Nguyen, comparing this part of the human capacity to the underwater portion of the iceberg.
The narrative is easy to understand. We possess much more knowledge than what is spoken or formally expressed.
Need for a framework
- Where do innovations start?
- A framework and a process for capturing knowledge are often needed. Out of people’s personal and hidden knowledge, new ideas and new concepts may surface. This is where innovation comes from. We must have a process to help people to articulate their creative ideas and new concepts, and bring them into new products and services, says Nhien Nguyen.
Ideas don’t arise automatically. Nguyen stresses that there are methods and tools that can be used to spur the creation of new ideas.
The SECI steps
She refers to the SECI model for knowledge conversion, originally developed in 1990 by Ikujiro Nonaka, a Japanese professor best known for his studies in knowledge management. The "SECI" acronym is formed by the terms Socialization, Externalization, Combination, and Internalization. [1]
Explaining the four steps, Nguyen says that a transdisciplinary approach requires shared knowledge and common understanding as a starting point. Socialization is the process of exploring tacit knowledge through shared experience. Networking is an obvious example. Externalization refers to making knowledge explicit, e.g. by articulating it through metaphor, analogy and model. Combination means synthesizing different sources of explicit knowledge and converting them into a more complex and systematic set of knowledge, e.g. through reports and strategy documents.
Finally, the crucial step is to convert the explicit knowledge into individual tacit knowledge (internalization), through reflecting or learning by doing. This type of knowledge is a valuable asset which can initiate a new spiral of knowledge creation when being shared with others through socialization. Innovation can be expected to come out of such a knowledge-sharing process. And an innovation ecosystem plays a key role as shared context (“Ba” ) for knowledge creation, a community of practice for knowledge sharing and transfer, and a place for making innovation happen.
- I believe this model can facilitate knowledge-sharing and help establish a foothold for developing NorwAI’s innovation ambitions, says Nhien Nguyen. We will organize and coordinate activities to make NorwAI an adaptive ecosystem for AI innovation.
Nguyen’s ideas and approach, which have benefited from her experience coordinating EU Horizon 2020 projects on building innovation ecosystems, were welcomed at the joint meeting of work package leaders and the Advisory Scientific and Innovation Boards of NorwAI in Trondheim last week. NorwAI is planning further knowledge-sharing activities among partners to stimulate innovation in the wake of its research programs.
[1] Nonaka, L., Takeuchi, H., & Umemoto, K. (1996). A theory of organizational knowledge creation. International Journal of Technology Management, 11(7-8), 833-845.