Do Knowledge Experience Packages Improve Knowledge Transfer? Results from a Controlled Experiment

• DOI: 10.2316/p.2012.790-007
• Publication Date: 2013-03-12T13:16:54Z
• Authors: Pasquale Ardimento; Vito Nicola Conve...; Marcela Genero Bocco; Giuseppe Visaggio

The transfer of research results into production systems requires, among other things, to make these results explicit and understandable for stakeholders. Many researchers have been studying means to favour knowledge acquisition on the behalf of stakeholders using not only scientific papers. In fact, scientific papers have limitations in the transferability and reusability of knowledge owing to: size limitations that do not permit all the necessary knowledge to be exploited; structure and contents heterogeneity that could cause conflicts; and redundancy and incoherence between papers dealing with same topic. We therefore propose the concept of the Knowledge Experience Package (KEP) that contains both the conceptual “model(s) of the research results which make up the innovation, including all the necessary documentation ranging from papers or book chapters, and the” [42] appropriately structured experience acquired from the business processes. The KEP conceptual model has been implemented in a Knowledge Experience Base (KEB) called PROMETHEUS. The principal goal of this work is to assess whether the knowledge transferred by a KEP, and delivered by PROMETHEUS, adds comprehensibility to the knowledge transferred by scientific papers. A controlled experiment was therefore carried out with 14 IT professionals contracted in projects led by the Alarcos research group at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), all of whom have degrees in Computer Science. The comprehension of the knowledge transferred was analyzed from three different perspectives: semantic comprehension, retention and transfer. The evidence collected permits us to state that the structure of the KEP increases the ability to retain knowledge in a significant manner than occurs with scientific papers only. The results have encouraged us to carry out further studies in order to refine the KEP structure, although we are conscious that the results should be considered as preliminary.