Much of their work is built on an examination of the different concepts of knowledge in the East and the West. In their book “The Knowledge-Creating Company”, the two academics differentiated between what they called implicit and explicit knowledge: the former is the eastern type; the latter is familiar to the West. Implicit knowledge is intuitive, ambiguous and non-linear; explicit knowledge is the exact opposite, laid down in manuals, analysed and stored in databases.
They outlined a four-stage process by which an organisation develops knowledge. They gave it an acronym, SECI, which stands for socialisation, externalisation, combination/creation and internalisation. These are the means by which knowledge is “amplified throughout the organisation, creating a spiral model of knowledge creation”.
Source:
http://www.economist.com/business/management/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13517582&Fsrc=mgttkgnwl