Engineering and manufacturing organisations share best practices in order to develop their operations to achieve competitive advantage. Such sharing requires transferring knowledge between an organisation’s individuals. To accomplish this, many engineering and manufacturing firms rely mainly on information and communications technology (ICT) in managing sharing knowledge and best practices. Augmented Reality (AR) has recently been described as a supportive tool to share detailed and complex data which could be used by manufacturing organisations. Accordingly, this research project will investigate the potential role of facilitating Knowledge Transfer utilising Augmented Reality.
In order to investigate how Augmented Reality impact on knowledge transfer, a detailed knowledge transfer process model is employed. Based on the employed model, knowledge transformation is found as a critical process that represents transforming information into knowledge as well as converting knowledge into different forms. Hence, an investigation of the potential impacts on tacit/explicit knowledge possible conversions is presented.
In order to conduct this investigation, this paper uses an Augmented Reality Organisation as a source for its data; it analyses the contents of the engineering-and-manufacturing-related-talks delivered at the Augmented World Expo 2014 conference. The analysis is carried out through testing the presented applications in the presentations against the pre-identified characteristics that represent each conversion mode.
In this paper, it is found that AR is a promising technology that plays a significant role in several knowledge transformation modes. AR can facilitate the four different types of knowledge transformation i.e. tacit-tacit, tacit-explicit, explicit-tacit and explicit-explicit. However, it is also found that all of the applications that can possibly facilitate tacit-tacit knowledge conversion are underdeveloped applications (in-lab tests). Nevertheless, AR can facilitate knowledge transfer and sharing best practices in engineering and manufacturing firms in a way that can support competitive advantages by increasing efficiency, quality and minimising waste.