Communicative Exchange Processes for Emerging Countries: How the Design of Communication Tools and Collaborative Networks Support the Interpersonal Tacit Knowledge Sharing

Tacit knowledge can be defined as a particular form of knowledge used by people to address, deal and manage practical issues involving the immediate use of experience, abilities and manual skills. It is a kind of knowledge acquired and refined through the iterative practice of “doing” and over the time, it becomes a continuous learning process depending to the context in which we operate and it is tied to people that maintain it. However, the process of ‘know-how sharing’ offers the possibility to give a real social and economic emancipation to practical experience and to tacit knowledge embedded in people. This possibility could allow the start of a collective and participative development of competences, abilities and skills usually belonging to a stakeholder’s personal realm. In order to have good know-how sharing, it is necessary to have appropriately designed tools, which are able to codify, support and amplify this process. Among most advanced products available, communicative tools and collaborative networks are recognized as those mostly able to guarantee information management and an amplification of communicative data. The paper describes how communication tools and collaborative networks can be used to share this particular kind of unspoken knowledge at interpersonal level. Starting from the analysis of the communicative process related to tacit knowledge, the study proposes a new process for sharing tacit information and introduces some strategic and communicative solutions, as well as some design scenarios related to knowledge sharing in emerging countries and developing economies.