TEACHING TACIT KNOWLEDGE: CAN ARTIFICAL INTELIGENCE HELP?

Abstract

In the paper we first examine students´ ability to use tacit knowledge. We conducted the experiment to test whether the students are able to transfer and use tacit knowledge they obtained in the basic course of Strategic management. As tacit knowledge is difficult to transfer to another person we used course design with several experiential techniques to increase the students´ abilities in the field of Strategic management. For the evaluation experiment we chose to play a board game “Power Grid”, where we tested whether the students were able to use knowledge they had been taught in the basic course. As the result we found out low students´ ability to use tacit knowledge even despite the fact that in the basic course where they obtained the knowledge we used experiential techniques which force students to acquire a skill and therefore, according to Polanyi (in Schmidt, Hunter, 1993), they also acquire corresponding understanding that defies articulation, therefore tacit knowledge. According to the result of the experiment we propose the business game with the artificial intelligence as a teaching tool which can be further discussed as a tool for teaching specific tacit knowledge in the paper.

Keywords

• Tacit knowledge
• artificial intelligence
• strategic management
• experiential learning
• neural network