Abstract

Johan Holmqvist, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden Abstract: Actionable knowledge is a competitive advantage to most organizations today. It is difficult to manage knowledge in technical projects, however, because both creation and use are embedded in the daily work. Experiences need to be extracted from activities, reflected on, and then contextualized again if they are going to benefit another project. The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate experience sharing in early product development work and from that contribute to improved capture and formalization of experiences. The importance of a continuous learning process is stressed, but so is the capability of directed knowledge conversations. A demonstrator supporting such activities has been developed and partly tested. Not only the outline of the demonstrator, called the knowledge compass, but also the rationale are presented in this paper. The guiding questions included in the demonstrator have been evaluated as a sound basis of experience sharing for company representatives.