Knowledge Sharing Among Professionals in a Regional Cluster Across the Organizations : Positive Factors and Negative Factors

This report describes the knowledge sharing among professionals in a regional cluster, with the factors extracted from the regional cluster surveys at Silicon Valley US, and Kyoto-Fushimi breweries in Japan.  At both areas, there are many professionals with advanced professional knowledge or advanced professional skills.  For the professionals, losing rarity may mean to lose their position or the continuity of the job.  However, at above areas, there are knowledge sharing and seeds offering of new ideas.  There are condensations of valuable information to who shares their own knowledge, and this yields better environment to new technology development.  In the society where people have the norm that the knowledge sharing is desirable, to hide the information means the deviate from the norm.  The sanction for it appears as the isolation from the network.  In both areas, job change happens so often, people share their knowledge even to the people who might leave the team or organization.  As shown in the previous researches, the behind of these phenomena has the positive factor that there are many possibilities to connect the people of outside the organization by the crossing of various kinds of network.  Easy job change environment is also the factor.  In case of Fushimi, there are many people who share their knowledge at the study groups across the organization.  This is from the spirits of engineers who want to “brew better Sake”.  But this is not the all of the common situation for the people in both areas, there are also exist negative factors to force people to “mutual solidarity”.  At Silicon Valley, there are many people who fear to lose their jobs because there are frequent bankrupts or layoffs.  The entrepreneurs also have huge pressure from the investors when they face the difficulties about their business.  There are people who fail to the mental sickness or suicide by losing their games.  Also in Fushimi, there had been the possibility of spoiling all brewed Sake because of the difficulties to control the brewing process.  This might cause the case to lose all owners’ assets, and there were some sad cases that the responsible engineers killed themselves.  Recently there is no such case with the modernized brewing technologies.  Still the Sake brewing is deeply influenced with its materials and the weather, bad Sake may be brewed with a slight mistake to decide the brewing process.  Thus, today’s engineers also feel significant responsibilities and huge pressures.  Both in Silicon Valley engineers or entrepreneurs, and Fushimi Sake brewing engineers, shares their mutual solidarity spirit under such similar responsibilities and pressures.  As described above, not only the intellectual curiosity and the wish to improve their levels, but also, there exists the factor of mutual solidarity under the very strong pressures.