Abstract

In dynamic business contexts where knowledge is continually evolving and thus critical for better organizational performance, not only knowledge re-use but also knowledge re-creation becomes more and more important. One of these contexts is the use of non-renewable resources in innovative hightech products. Since media recently spread – often contradictory – news about the increasing scarcity of non-renewable resources, decision makers face a high degree of uncertainty. They struggle to understand and handle the information available. Therefore, it is essential to provide a methodological approach to externalize and combine expert knowledge of a system’s inherent logic. Hence, in this paper we show that mental models of experts can be transformed into an explicit simulation model in order to support decision makers comprehending the short- and long-term dynamic interdependencies of the development of non-renewable resources on demand, supply, and price. For this purpose, we combine known cause-and-effect relationships into an integrated model using the system dynamics methodology. The application of the idea to capture knowledge in a simulation model is exemplarily instantiated with real-world information for the case of indium.

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