The Structural Model of National Knowledge Creation Processes: An Interpretative Structural Modeling Approach

At the macro level, society includes a variety of industries and organizations, each of which in turn is moving toward becoming a foundational science because incompatibility with global developments leads to failure. So organizations need to have the flexibility to change their structure, goals, strategies, and vision. One of the tools used to create a knowledge-based organization is to create the process of knowledge creation to gain a competitive advantage. As a result creation of the concept of the process of creating national knowledge will is not out of the reach. Today, countries need management of knowledge resources and, in particular, the knowledge creation for knowledge development. There are lots of studies in the field of organizational knowledge creation and so various models have been developed for this purpose. But, the important point is that the creation of knowledge has so far been at the organizational level and in some cases cross-organization and among the subset of a parent organization. The innovation of this article is identifying the process of knowledge creation at the national level.

For this purpose, based on the literature review and analyzing the research gap, using the Delphi method and a survey of experts, possible processes at the national knowledge creation has been addressed. The panel of experts includes seven professors and experts in the field of knowledge management, who are both theoretically and experimentally familiar with this concept.

The results of Delphi technique show that the processes of socialization, externalization, combination, culture creation, application, and internalization can be referred to as the processes of national knowledge creation. Using interpretive structural modeling, it was revealed that the processes of socialization, internalization and externalization are at level 1, the processes of culture and combination are in the second level and the process of application is at the third level of the model.

The results of the National Knowledge Creation Model indicate that socialization, externalization, and internalization are the cornerstones of the model. This means that in order to successfully implement the creation of knowledge at the national level, one must first invest in these issues. According to the results obtained it is clearly seen that the processes of combination and culture making are independent dimensions and planning for combining knowledge among different organizations and organizational programming for culture building at organizational level can be done independent of other processes. It should be noted that the identification of the structures of the process of creating the national knowledge process has been achieved based on theoretical foundations and receiving the opinions and of a limited number of academic and experimental experts. Therefore, the scope for future research is the application of factor analysis method, path analysis and structural equation modeling approach to test the research model to examine the validity of the obtained model.