The dynamics of knowledge transfer is an important topic for engineering managers. In this paper, we study knowledge boundaries—barriers to knowledge transfer—in groups of experts, using topic modeling, a natural language processing technique, applied to transcript data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Circulatory Systems Advisory Panel. As predicted by prior theory, we find that knowledge boundaries emerge as the group faces increasingly challenging problems. Beyond this theory, we find that knowledge boundaries cease to structure communications between communities of practice when the group's expert ability is insufficient to solve its task, such as in the presence of high novelty. We conjecture that the amount of expert knowledge that the group can collectively bring to bear is a determining factor in boundary formation. This implies that some of the factors underlying knowledge boundary formation may aid—rather than hinder—knowledge aggregation. We briefly explore this conjecture using qualitative exploration of several relevant meetings. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results for organizations attempting to leverage their expertise given the state of their collective knowledge.

中文翻译：

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知识边界的出现和崩溃

知识转移的动态是工程经理的一个重要课题。在本文中，我们使用主题建模（一种自然语言处理技术）以专家组形式研究知识边界（知识转移的障碍），并应用于美国食品和药物管理局循环系统咨询小组的转录数据。正如先前理论所预测的那样，我们发现随着团队面临越来越具有挑战性的问题，知识边界出现了。除了这个理论之外，我们发现，当团队的专家能力不足以解决其任务时，例如在高度新颖的情况下，知识边界将停止构建实践社区之间的交流。我们推测，该小组可以共同承担的专家知识的数量是边界形成的决定性因素。这意味着知识边界形成背后的一些因素可能有助于——而不是阻碍——知识聚合。我们通过对几个相关会议的定性探索来简要探讨这个猜想。最后，我们讨论了这些结果对于试图利用其集体知识状态的专业知识的组织的影响。