What is knowledge maturing?
Learning is an inherently social and collaborative activity in which individual learning processes are interdependent and dynamically interlinked with each other: the output of one learning process is input to the next. If we have a look at this phenomenon from a macroscopic perspective, we can observe a knowledge flow across different interlinked individual learning processes. The knowledge becomes less contextualized, more explicitly linked, easier to communicate, in short: it matures.
We define knowledge maturing as the goal-oriented development of collective knowledge, or better as goal-oriented learning on a collective level where
- goal-oriented describes knowledge maturing as a process with a direction. The goal can be an individual goal (e.g., deepen understanding in an area out of curiosity), a team goal (e.g., grasp known errors with respect to a product that the team works on), or an organisational goal (e.g., refine an organisation‟s core competency). Goals typically change over time and get aligned in social processes, resulting in a direction as a (mostly a posteriori) interpretation.
- collective level can refer to different levels of granularity, e.g., a team, an organisation or a com-munity. Knowledge maturing is not the result of an individual‟s activity, but of an interconnected series of activities of interacting individuals, frequently also within different collectives.
- knowledge is understood as both cognitive structures bound to individuals‟ minds (becoming manifest in their behaviour) and as an abstraction of the knowledge of individuals in a collective.
