Knowledge is often tacit and “sticky,” that is, highly context-specific and, therefore, costly to transfer to a different setting. This article examines the methods used by firms to facilitate cross-site knowledge sharing by “thinning” knowledge, that is, by stripping knowledge of its contextual richness. An interview-based study of cross-site knowledge sharing in three industries (consulting, industrial materials, and high-tech products) indicates that highly developed knowledge-sharing systems do not necessarily involve extensive codification and recombination of personalized knowledge. Many multinational firms evidently conceive their knowledge-sharing systems with more modest objectives in mind than any large-scale “learning spirals” featuring iterative conversion of personalized knowledge into codified knowledge and vice versa. A typology of knowledge-thinning systems is derived by interpreting the field study results from the perspective of knowledge-thinning methods used in earlier eras of history. The typology encompasses topographical, statistical, and diagrammatic knowledge-thinning systems.
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