Tacit Knowledge is Studied, Understood and Celebrated. Sato’s team regularly meets to review and fine tune new elements of tacit insight. The knowledge management system also generates regular reports on performance, both individually and by teams, and sales efforts that include deductions and inductions about reasons for success. The tacit knowledge insights from Nippon Roche are regularly assembled by the corporation’s enterprise-wide knowledge management system and compared with insights from other divisions of the multinational Roche Group. The meta-analysis of these different elements of tacit knowledge are very important in understanding how success factors vary from setting to setting and culture to culture.

Widely understood, internalized tacit knowledge is the key to Nippon Roche’s success in the Japanese marketplace. Continuous, rapid changes in the marketplace require this knowledge to be synthesized, updated, and shared with far greater speed than in the past.

Secondary Income from Non-Proprietary Knowledge. Sato’s team, like other groups within Nippon Roche, has generated a variety of syntheses of their insights on sales and problem solving in pharmaceutical settings. Most of these are treated as highly proprietary and are key to Nippon Roche’s success. However, a subset of nonproprietary knowledge has been made available to several secondary marketplaces and has become a key element of the academic programs of several business schools and medical schools. This is a significant source of secondary income for Nippon Roche.

Resources of Interest

Deloitte & Touche Consulting. 2001.
From e-Learning to Enterprise Learning. New York, Deloitte Research, 112–115.

Conrad Elliott—
Member, Computer Society
of the IEEE, USA

Conrad Elliott is an electrical engineer with Texas Instruments (TI) in Austin, Texas. He has an adjunct faculty appointment with the University of Texas at Austin. He is a member of the Computer Society of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (CSIEEE), the world’s premier professional society serving computer professionals. It serves well over 100,000 members and several hundred thousands of customers who acquire free and fee-based products, services, and experiences from the society’s Web site and various portals accessible from the Web site. Of CSIEEE’s $40 million (U.S.) budget, less than ten percent comes from dues — over 90 percent comes from consumer-based revenues.

A Powerhouse Body of Knowledge. For years, the CSIEEE has been a publishing powerhouse. In 2000, its publishing and meetings portfolio included 21 periodicals, major e-publishing ventures, 170 books annually, and 150 sponsored conferences annually, with associated tutorials on emerging topics and applications. Over the past five years, the society has been migrating this portfolio of resources into a defined body of knowledge accessible through its Web site. The body of knowledge has been made available to several other repositories and marketplaces, enabling the CSIEE to reach far broader markets of consumers for its e-knowledge.

Portal-Centric Experiences.Conrad Elliott uses the CSIEEE portal every day. He has created a personal portal as a gateway with links to his TI portal, the CSIEEE portal, the University of Texas portal, and the portal for the Round Rock Baptist Church. The TI portal provides Elliott with the company’s own body of knowledge on corporate strategy and policies, products, market developments, competitive analysis, and personal employee issues.