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LP18
Today, organizations face the crucial challenge of creating and managing knowledge in order to
succeed. As part of the Knowledge Management process, Knowledge Socialization is a critical step
during which the community experiences a decisive interchange of ideas. In this work, we present a
new model for Knowledge Management based on the classic Nonaka and Takeuchi's one but
adapted to the Web 2.0 by using wiki technologies to support
elBulli, voted by industry authority Restaurant magazine as the best restaurant in the world in 2002
and from 2006 to 2009 (William, 2012), has now become a foundation for creativity and innovation
in high cuisine. It incorporates disciplines such as technology, science, philosophy, and the arts in
its research. Aware of the value of knowledge, the organization publishes its results in international
conferences, books or journal articles, in a similar way to the academic process of peer review.
Therefore, elBulli is an appropriate case to apply a Knowledge Management model that makes
maximum use of its knowledge.
In recent years, the technological development and globalization have produced significant structural changes in society and the economy. New emergent industries embody a new economic reality: knowledge has become the main economic resource (Drucker, 1969). Indeed, nowadays, knowledge is the asset that generates more value in an organization, and the competitiveness of companies depends heavily on how they maintain and access their knowledge (Fensel, 2004; Davies, 2003).
Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi propose a model whereby the creation of knowledge is a
continuous and iterative process that transforms tacit knowledge (individual and subjective) into
explicit (objective and shared) and vice versa (Nonaka, 1995). This process goes through four
phases:
elBulli is especially fascinating because of the processes from elBulli Restaurant to elBulli Foundation and the way the organization has redefined itself in the last few years: evolution and
reinvention, diffusion of their practices, concepts and techniques across time and social space, etc.
(William, 2012)
By applying Nonaka and Takeuchi’s principles, we can demonstrate that this organization creates
valuable knowledge:
Adrià suggests externalizing all their knowledge onto the Bullipedia, an online database that “will
contain every piece of gastronomic knowledge ever gathered”. Adrià and some of the best chefs all
over the world are putting in common their wisdom to agree on the content of the Bullipedia. Their
aim is to create an encyclopedia with 15,000 articles “where users will leave suggestions for dishes,
concepts and combinations of flavours” that will affect, in Adrià’s opinion, other chefs’ creativity.
This agreement can only be achieved through a sound process of socialization. According to Nonaka & Takeuchi’s cycle, socialization entails a transformation from individual tacit knowledge into collective tacit knowledge. This conversion is extremely hard to carry out due to tacit knowledge being highly personal, deeply attached to individual actions in a specific context (a profession, a technology…) and composed of individual’s technical skills that can only be acquired by learning and improved by experience . Hence, it is difficult to formalize and share.
Our contribution is a new model for Knowledge Management in which we replace the
disadvantaged classic
Thus, we showcase the advantages that our model would provide in a case such as that of Adrià and
his colleagues when building the Bullipedia from scratch, so that they really benefit from the
interaction with a large community of prosumers and use wiki technologies to exchange ideas and
develop a more nuanced metalanguage that really supports this initative and make it sustainable in
the long term. This approach could also be exploited in other cases of collaboration such as
collective software construction, project documentation or interactive learning.
Theoretical framework: the power of crowds, social networks and collaborative technologies
Socializing knowledge is critical to both its evolution and its usefulness (Inmon, 2008). Knowledge
Management cycle might provide better outcomes, in terms of quality and value of knowledge, by
improving the socialization process. In the case of elBulli, Adrià and his colleagues are agreeing on
the content of the upcoming Bullipedia. However, they discovered that the hardest part was to find a
common language, that is, the worlds of science and gastronomy may share similar processes and
methodologies, but they rarely intersect.
It is at this point in which we believe things can be enhanced: turning to a big community instead of
a few experts. We borrow some James Surowiecki’s concepts on crowdsourcing (Adams, 2011;
Schall, 2012; Sautter, 2011; Doan, 2011; Brabham, 2008). Surowiecki asserts that a large group of
people is smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant (Surowiecki, 2004). Four conditions
must be met for a crowd’s collective intelligence to produce more accurate outcomes than a small
group of experts (Tapscott, 2006):
We can demonstrate Surowiecki’s ideas are applicable to our model. First of all, the case of elBulli
is both especially interdisciplinary and heterogeneous enough. Adrià uses “cuisine as a discourse in
order to create a dialogue with other disciplines”. The foundation is a mash-up of science, the arts,
philosophy and technology as a creativity-generating universe that produces knowledge (William,
2012). It is this crossroad among various disciplines what creates such heterogeneity and diversity
of knowledge and opinions about the same topic (1).
Secondly, advance in technology have provided novel ways to socialize knowledge. Social
networks have created a new reality of social interaction (Easly, 2010; Mika, 2007) that has enabled
more effective ways of agreement (Mazzega, 2011). Users organized around a wiki constitute a
non-hierarchical and decentralized social network whose members are independent but collaborate
(Leuf, 2001) (2 y 3). According to Complex Systems theory, members in social networks selforganize
and agreement emerges from the bottom-up as a result of their interactions (Wood, 2010;
Jones-Rooy, 2010).
Finally, a wiki fosters the idea of prosumers collaborating on the Web as it blurs the line between
the reader and the writer (Caverly, 2008). Many online communities have adopted this approach to
create collective knowledge (John, 2004; Krötzsch, 2006; Ebersbach, 2006). Wikipedia, the great
online encyclopedia, supports this proposition. Therefore, Wikis are a good method for aggregating
knowldge and opinions (4).
We have shown that elBulli creates valuable knowledge by applying Nonaka and Takeuchi’s
principles. The organization is now creating the Bullipedia, an online database that “will contain
every piece of gastronomic knowledge ever gathered”. Nonaka & Takeuchi's cycle can be adapted
to manage that knowledge in social networks based on prosumers. In our model, we propose: