Acquisition of Tacit Knowledge in Virtual Organizations

Organizations increasingly need to maintain and share the knowledge of their employees. In virtual organizations (VO), where the cooperation between the partners has a restricted life span, this need may be more important. In this paper, we present our results concerning the knowledge acquisition process in virtual organizations. This process is decomposed in two stages. The first one permits to extract solely explicit knowledge, the second one concerns tacit knowledge. This division permits to complete the existent methods of knowledge extraction. In fact, these methods have been criticized because extracting tacit knowledge is not allowed. In order to illustrate our findings, we present a case study selected in the building field.