Any organization that deals with a changing environment ought not only to process information efficiently, but also create information and knowledge. - Ikujiro Nonaka

Why is ultimately a question of purpose: Why do we exist? In most organizations, people are not encouraged to keep asking questions.

In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge.

As for the epistemological dimension, we draw on Michael Polanyi's (1966) distinction between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is personal, context-specific, and therefore hard to formalize and communicate. Explicit or "codified" knowledge, on the other hand, refers to knowledge that is transmittable in formal, systematic language.