To raise its competitiveness in the global 21st-century knowledge society, Thailand should develop a unique national contribution, a well-known expert on knowledge management said earlier this week.

"Thailand should establish its vision based on the fundamental issue of what does the country exist for in the world," said Professor Ikujiro Nonaka Nonaka.

He said Thailand needed to identify its uniqueness to create a domain for the country, interpreted into concept and practice.

"Thailand has to set up its goal and the means to accomplish it. Execution and action must be conducted persistently and relentlessly," said Nonaka.

Nonaka is professor emeritus at Hitotsu-bashi University (International Corporate Strategy) in Japan. He is the keynote speaker at a seminar on "Knowledge-Management - From Brain to Business" being held by the Thailand Productivity Institute today and tomorrow at Sofitel Central Plaza Bangkok.

Nonaka said the Kingdom should learn from countries such as the United States and Japan.

He said that while the US has a short-term market mechanism-oriented focus, Japan emphasises relentless and never-give-up activities to help the country achieve its goal.

He said Thailand, however, should not imitate the knowledge-management creations of the Americans, Europeans or Japanese, and should instead develop its own.

"Similar to certain business organisations, middle managers or project leaders have served as a strategic knot to promote the flow of information and knowledge in the business community. This is to solve the contradiction between what top management wants to communicate to frontline people and what actually exists," said Nonaka.

,He added that middle managers and project leaders should be encouraged to develop the sharing of emotional knowledge such as care, love, trust and safety, which are the key social capital of the country.

In a knowledge-based society, Nonaka defined two types of knowledge: the tacit knowledge of the individual and the implicit knowledge that comes through interpersonal dialogue.

Tacit knowledge is personal knowledge embedded in individual experience and involves intangible and subjective factors, such as personal beliefs, perspectives and value systems. Tacit knowledge is hard (but not impossible) to articulate in formal language. It contains subjective insights, intuitions and hunches. Before tacit knowledge can be communicated, it must be converted into words, models, or numbers that can be understood.

Tacit knowledge can be also converted into explicit concepts through metaphors, analogies and hypotheses.

The convergence of tacit and implicit knowledge can be promoted through dialogue, practice, knowledge assets and environment.

"To create this type of knowledge, you need a commitment from each of the participants," said Nonaka.

Organisational knowledge, when leveraged, can help an organisation to manage its core business processes, increase the competitiveness of its products and services, and adapt to changing environments.

Nonaka developed the idea of an organisation (community) as creators of knowledge. In an organisation, knowledge is created through a "knowledge spiral" when the interaction between tacit and implicit knowledge is elevated dynamically from a lower level to higher levels of form - an increase in sophistication and complexity.

"Knowledge-based management is not just sharing knowledge and experience by simply using information processing such as IT. It is a way of life and humanistic approach," said Nonaka. "Knowledge management is not a tool to make money, but a way of life, because it shares individual visions, dreams and what we believe for the future."

Kwanchai Rungfapaisarn

 The Nation