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This article aims to explore the so-called illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) of managers regarding their understanding of digital technologies and examines the effect of knowledge visualization one’s current understanding and decision making. Its purpose is to show that managers think they know more than they do and that this affects decision making but can be reduced through knowledge visualization.

In two experiments with experienced managers, the authors investigate the size and impact of the IOED bias in decision making and examine if sketched self-explanations are as effective as written self-explanations to reduce the bias.

The findings show that experienced managers suffer from a significant illusion concerning their explanatory understanding of digital technologies and that sketching one’s current level of explanatory understanding of these technologies supports the accurate calibration of one’s knowledge. The findings indicate that sketching knowledge is a helpful modality for the detection and subsequent recalibration of biased knowledge in domain-dependent decision making.

This article is the first to explore the effect of sketched knowledge externalization on the calibration of explanatory knowledge of managers. It extends the literature on both, the IOED and on knowledge visualization as an instrument of knowledge calibration.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the reflective use of visual techniques in qualitative inter-viewing and suggests using visuals not only as projective techniques to elicit answers, but also as facilitation techniques throughout the interview process.

By reflecting on their own research projects in organization and management studies, the authors develop a practical approach to visual interviewing – making use of both projective and facilitation techniques. The paper concludes by discussing the limitations of visualization techniques, and suggesting directions for future research on visually enhanced interviewing.

The integration of projective and facilitation techniques enables the interviewer to build rapport with the respondent(s), and to elicit deeper answers by providing cognitive stimulation. In the course of the interview, such an integrative approach brings along further advantages, most notably focusing attention, maintaining interaction, and fostering the co-construction of knowledge between the interviewer and the interviewee(s).

This paper is reflective of what is currently occurring in the field of qualitative interviewing, and presents a practical approach for the integration of visual projection and facilitation in qualitative interviews.

This paper aims to study hybrid knowledge visualization in police crime fighting and military operations. Making effective and timely use of all available, relevant knowledge is a major requirement for today’s police officers who strive to fight organized crime or resolve complex criminal acts under time pressure. As they share this knowledge integration challenge with many management contexts, the authors have examined the knowledge visualization practices of a leading regional police force (and of a military unit) to derive insights for corporate knowledge management.

To examine the knowledge visualization practices of a leading regional police force, the authors have conducted on-site observations, focus groups and interviews, as well as site, document, tool and software analyses within the police headquarters.

As one main result of their empirical investigation, the authors find that the police force’s practice of hybrid (i.e. digital and physical) knowledge visualization offers a useful strategy for corporate knowledge management as well. They also show how organizations can apply this dual approach to making knowledge visible, i.e. using sophisticated visualization software in combination with hands-on physical and permanently visible knowledge boards.

They discuss how these two modalities can be combined to improve knowledge management and how this hybrid practice can be understood theoretically through the lens of boundary object theory. With this regard, this article also extends the boundary object theory by identifying nine dynamic qualities of collaborative visualizations.

The purpose of this article is to explore the potential of visualization for corporate knowledge management.

The employed methodology consists of a taxonomy of visualization formats that are embedded in a conceptual framework to guide the application of visualization in knowledge management according to the type of knowledge that is visualized, the knowledge management objective, the target group, and the application situation. This conceptual framework is illustrated through real‐life examples.

The findings show that there is much room for knowledge management applications based on visualization beyond the mere referencing of experts or documents through knowledge maps.

The research implications thus consist of experimenting actively with new forms of visual knowledge representation and evaluating their benefits or potential drawbacks rigorously.

The authors encourage managers to look beyond simple diagrammatic representations of knowledge and explore alternative visual languages, such as visual metaphors or graphic narratives.

This paper consists of two elements: first, the systematic, descriptive and prescriptive approach towards visualization in knowledge management, and second the innovative examples of how to harness the power of visualization in knowledge management.

In this paper, the authors aim to review the benefits of sketching or ad‐hoc, collaborative hand drawings for knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, and knowledge documentation.

The authors conducted a comprehensive literature review in the fields of design, psychology, and computer science that documents the multiple advantages of sketch‐based approaches for managing knowledge in organizations, especially on the team‐level. The authors argue for the complementary use of this “low‐tech knowledge management” approach with existing digital infrastructures and tools. The literature survey is based on a search for the title term “sketching” on the ISI Web of Knowledge online database. After topic filtering and eliminating all articles where sketching was used in the sense of a project proposal or a theoretical sketch, there were only 48 articles left related to the keyword “sketching”. Based on the authors' awareness of important contributions in the field of sketching, which did not appear in the database search, they extended their inclusion criteria to include grey or conference literature and examined the reference sections of highly cited articles. The article concludes with a set of propositions for practitioners regarding the use of sketching in different knowledge management contexts and with implications for future research in this area.

Knowledge creation contexts, such as innovation management or problem solving sessions, provide participants with the opportunity to jointly devise large scale sketches in order to integrate their views and experiences on joint frameworks. Knowledge sharing situations, such as in team briefings or debriefings, in hand‐over processes, or in strategic alliances, equip all participants with pens and paper tablecloths to augment their knowledge dialogues with visible means that facilitate interaction and turn‐taking, increase vividness and memorability, and allow for an authentic and personal follow‐up documentation.

An implication for research is to study sketching in knowledge management through interdisciplinary research efforts. This could be done by paying attention to the way that digital and hand‐drawn sketches affect interactions differently among professionals and the way that they share, defend, and integrate their knowledge. Specifically researchers with a background in organizational psychology could work jointly with human computer interaction specialists to study differences among analogue and digital sketching activities. In this way one can learn about the respective advantages and risks of hand‐drawn versus computer‐supported sketching for knowledge‐intensive group collaboration tasks.

The literature review resulted in an extended list of benefits which support three relevant tasks in knowledge management, namely knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and knowledge documentation. This compilation shows simple and effective ways in which the use of hand drawings can enhance existing knowledge management practices.

This paper aims to shed light on the specificity of branding approaches for young companies for the reason that branding is a crucial activity for the survival and success of a newly established firm as it facilitates finding and maintain customers.

Adopting a case study methodology, mainly through in‐depth interviews with CEOs and communication managers, 15 of the largest and most successful start‐up companies of Switzerland were analyzed.

The paper establishes an overview on the current practices and rational of the brand building activities choices, and on the emblematic pitfalls regarding branding of new ventures. It suggests that young companies should not be forced to compare their branding strategies to multinational firms and proposes a framework and key guidelines for start‐up branding.

Given that this study focuses specifically on Switzerland, the findings might not be fully applicable to different economic situations. Nevertheless analyzing the biggest start‐ups of a single country allows salient comparisons of the approaches towards branding within the same environment.

The proposed framework and guidelines can be relevant for future entrepreneurs and brand consultants, to orient and better motivate their decisions toward branding creations and development for new and young ventures.

This research investigates branding issues that are specific for newly created companies, in order to support them in making informed decisions on branding activities, a crucial activity for the survival of start‐ups, given their lack of resources and fundamental need to find and maintain clients.

On many occasions, organizational science research has been referred to as fragmented and disjointed, resulting in a literature that is, in the opinion of many, difficult to navigate and comprehend. One potential explanation is that scholars have failed to comprehend that organizations are complex and intricate systems. In order to move us past this morass, we recommend that researchers extend beyond traditional rational, mechanistic, and variable-centered approaches to research and integrate a more advantageous pattern-oriented approach within their research program. Pattern-oriented methods approximate real-life phenomena by adopting a holistic, integrative approach to research wherein individual- and organizational-systems are viewed as non-decomposable organized wholes. We argue that the pattern-oriented approach has the potential to overcome a number of breakdowns faced by alternate approaches, while offering a novel and more representative lens from which to view organizational- and HRM-related issues. The proposed incorporation of the pattern-oriented approach is framed within a review and evaluation of current approaches to organizational research and is supplemented with a discussion of methodological and theoretical implications as well as potential applications of the pattern-oriented approach.

Business model innovation (BMI) constitutes a priority for managers across industries, but it represents a notoriously difficult innovation, with several challenges, many of which are cognitive in nature. The received literature has variously suggested that one way to overcome challenges to BMI, including cognitive ones, and support the cognitive tasks is using visual representations. Against this background, we aim at offering a contribution to the emerging line of inquiry at the nexus between business models (BMs), cognition and visual representations. Specifically, we develop a new method for visual representation of the BM in support of simplification of the cognitive effort and neutralisation of cognitive barriers. The resulting representation – a network-based representation, anchored on the activity-system perspective and offering complementarity and centrality/periphery measures – allows to visually represent an existing BM as a network (nodes and linkages) of interdependent activities and to express information related to the degree of centrality/periphery of single activities (nodes) with respect to the rest of a BM configuration. This information, we argue, is potentially very valuable in supporting the cognitive tasks involved in business model reconfiguration (BMR). We guide the reader to progressively appreciate how the development of the proposed method for visual representation is anchored to two main characteristics of BMR, namely the discovery-driven nature of BMR and the path-dependent nature of BMR. We offer initial insights on the cognitive value of such a type of representation in relationship to the simplification of the cognitive effort and the neutralisation of cognitive barriers in BMR.

System dynamics (SD) is emerging as a powerful approach to understand, analyse, simulate and predict complex and dynamic business processes. In particular, it is true in the process of business model innovation (BMI) and not only as a computational approach. Due to the visual and diagrammatic tools employed by SD, innovation managers overcome humans' mental limitations and improve knowledge management in the BMI. This paper discloses the value of SD's visual tools, i.e. causal loop diagrams and stock and flow diagrams, to contribute to the “Knowldege Visualization” research line, and promote the application of SD as a powerful approach to support decisions in BMI.

Given the explorative nature and the “how” question driving the research, the methodology involved is a single, holistic case study. In particular, the case is about a business model (BM) diversification, in which an information and communication technology service provider has added to its existing business model a new BM based on a digital multi-sided platform, for passengers transportation.

The diagrammatic tools of SD, that is causal loop diagrams and stock and flow diagrams, allowed entrepreneurs to overcome the complexity of the business parameters concurring in the design of the BM.

The value of this research is in the exploratory approach and in the originality of the perspective by which SD is analysed: the visual knowledge perspective.