Knowledge, Learning, Training

Key areas: Knowledge as production factor, transfer and diﬀusion, KMDL, protection of intellectual capital, learning and further education through new technologies, basic research, augmented reality, artiﬁcial intelligence, learning factory

Knowledge as the fourth production factor and its importance for the daily business

In addition to the three classical factors of work, land and capital, knowledge as the fourth production factor is becoming increasingly important in the course of digitisation. In contrast to other resources, knowledge is the only factor that increases when it is shared and therefore not only needs to be protected but also actively managed. Knowledge management promises methods and techniques for shaping the development, distribution and use of knowledge. Our research therefore focuses on the transfer and absorption of knowledge, as well as the inﬂuencing factors and the individual organizational changes caused by them.

The extension of conventional modeling languages by the factor knowledge - KMDL®.

The Knowledge Modeling and Description Language (KMDL) was developed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Norbert Gronau and colleagues to be able to represent knowledge conversions along business processes. It models information and knowledge ﬂows that take place between a company and its internal and external business partners and provides, for example, the basis for the prevention of product piracy. As a semiformal, graph-based modelling language, KMDL® is used in research and practice and can identify signiﬁcant improvement potentials for the prevailing knowledge management by describing knowledge conversions in the business environment. You can ﬁnd more information at kmdl.de

The protection of intellectual capital: a software tool to reduce product piracy

In the form of brand and product piracy, German companies are increasingly becoming the target of anti-competitive and mostly white-collar crime. Technological progress and the increased networking between suppliers, customers and service partners favour the potential for attack of a fatal skimming oﬀ of company know-how. In order to assess the risk of information and knowledge transfer with regard to possible product piracy and to consciously control the outﬂow of knowledge, a software tool for the identiﬁcation of critical information and knowledge ﬂows was developed at our chair. The Knowledge Firewall Designer (KFD) guides users in a company in several steps through an analysis process and identiﬁes with the help of KMDL® action-relevant interfaces for the introduction of protective measures.

The new importance of learning and further education through digital technologies

Digital technologies and the Internet inﬂuence all areas of life and place new demands on education and training. The corresponding transfer of competencies begins during school education and is continued within the training and further education. The question arises as to which competencies are necessary and relevant in a digital world and how they can be acquired. Our research group is particularly concerned with the questions of which societal changes are associated with the digitisation of education and further education, which role digitally supported teaching and learning concepts play and how important actors (schools, companies) deal with the topics of education and further education and how new teaching/learning farms can be established.

Experimental basic research - How we learn and forget

Many work routines are aﬀected by digital transformation. Employees have to learn new procedures and processes while forgetting old routines. Willful, controlled forgetting thus becomes the functional counterpart of data collection and learning. In our research we empirically investigate cognitive and social processes. With the goal of creating a transformation-friendly working environment, laboratory experiments are used to simulate real work processes and to observe the eﬀect of new technologies on the individuals and teams involved.

Augmented Reality: complexity reduction in the ﬁeld of work

Digitisation inevitably leads to an increase in the complexity of the possibilities for action. The industry must therefore design products that enable users to move around this new world as easily as possible. Digital technologies can help to ﬂexibly handle complex tasks such as operating a machine without the need for lengthy training or searching for information. Augmented Reality oﬀers a way to overcome the two-dimensionality of a manual so that the user ﬁnds the application process spatially visualized and can directly relate the real components to their digital counterparts. Our research is looking for AR solutions that reduce the complexity of the task area through visualized production instructions. Among other things, we have already developed a prototype for accompanying assembly processes, which accompanies the user in every step of the assembly process. Measurements show that errors in assembly are reduced by AR and that considerable time savings can be achieved in some cases.

Artiﬁcial intelligence in the area of transfer and diﬀusion of knowledge in organizations

Organisations are usually characterised by a high degree of distribution, a large number of participants or systems and the possibility of direct interaction between all participants. The overall system of an organization can be compared in its structure with biologically eﬃcient units such as a swarm of bees, an ant colony or the human brain. Artiﬁcial neural networks, swarm intelligences or ant algorithms are a subcategory of machine learning and include the attempt to replicate the biologically eﬃcient unit and its mode of operation. In our research, we investigate how organizations absorb and forget knowledge and equate the interaction of a biologically eﬃcient structure with that of an enterprise in order to ﬁnd forms of organization in which individual actors work together for the purpose of a larger corporate goal.

Our learning factory of the Research and Application Center Industry 4.0

The Learning Factory at the Research and Application Centre Industry 4.0 is based on an employee-oriented approach to the concept Industry 4.0. Participants are encouraged in further education projects to reﬂect on their own working environment and possible changes with the help of practical experience gained. The focus is particularly on the application and experience of practical scenarios.