Experience Experimentation And The Accumulation Of Knowledge

Download or read book Experience, Experimentation, and the Accumulation of Knowledge written by Jonathan West and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines the organizational capabilities supporting generation and retention of knowledge, and their relationship to R&D performance. It focuses on two mechanisms: retention of knowledge through experience, and generation of knowledge through experimentation. It argues that although both support performance, they do so in different ways. The capacity to generate knowledge by conducting a diverse variety of experiments should be particularly important in turbulent environments. The paper investigates these claims with detailed evidence from the semiconductor industry. This evidence describes the nature of knowledge-creation and knowledge-retention mechanisms in some detail, 'measures' their extent, and shows that these measures are indeed associated with performance. It then shows that one group of firms augmented these capabilities over time, achieving striking improvements. These improvements were associated with a shift in the organization of process-technology development, which increased the breadth of the search process through expanded experimentation capacity. The evolution of practice at one firm (Intel Corporation) is explored at greater length, providing a qualitative perspective on how the shift occurred.