技術の資産化に関する実態調査 : 中小製造業の類型とIT化行動のパターンについて

One of the most important tasks of the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is to share its employee's personal knowledge and skills for the product development and manufacturing process within their organization. The main purpose of the knowledge sharing is to increase the efficiency of total production process from the reception of an order to the delivery of products, thus to improve the response of the designing and manufacturing to their customer's demands. Recently in manufacturing industries, the information and communication technology (ICT) is rapidly diffusing in the area of the knowledge sharing or the learning assistance for workers and some prominent SMEs are known to have a great success in this field. But it is not so clear in existing researches how the other "ordinary" factories bring ICT into use in sharing their technical knowledge. In this paper, we will report the result of a questionnaire survey on how degree "average" factories introduce ICT to knowledge sharing, focusing on the documentation and sharing process of technical information and knowledge within their organization. The analysis of the survey shows that the firms that have parts-manufacturing or assembling process tend to organize the documentation routines of technical knowledge explicitly, but the tendency to have such knowledge as digital information is strengthened when the firm has the design and development processes. It is also suggested that the pattern of the documentation and the digitization of technical knowledge depends on the firm's technological field. This may reflect the fact that the difficulties and the needs for making technological knowledge explicit is different among different technological fields, and that the relationship between the manufacturing process and the development process is also different among technological fields