Implicit and explicit knowledge

From Nonaka's HBR paper "The knowledge-Creating Company", the following insights can be derived.
First, Western companies try to make decisions based on quantifiable data that often is put together into key metrics, such as increased efficiency, lower costs, improved return on investments.
Japanese companies try to use implicit knowledge for new product development. Here, creating knowledge is not only a matter of processing "objective" information, but depends on subjective insights, intuitions, hunches of individual employees. Often, this requires managers to use images, symbols and metaphors. In this view, a company is not a machine but a living organism. In order to arrive at this view, it takes a shared understanding of what a company stands for, where it is going, what kind of world it wants to live in, and how to make that world a reality. Inventing you knowledge is not the provinence of a specialized R&D department, but a way of behaving.
Central to the knowledge creating company is the activity of making personal knowledge available to others.
The process of turning implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge and vice-versa are especially valuable for an organization. In Nonaka's view, these transitions are the interfaces where knowledge is created.
Explicit knowledge are specification that can easily be communicated and shared in today's web communication systems.
For innovation, "tacit" knowledge is often valuable. Tacit knowledge is very subjective and highly personal. As Michael Polanyi said: "We can know more than we can tell."