Identifying required tacit knowledge and influencing factors of technology transfers - A case study of a biotech manufacturing process transfer from Germany to the US

Expert knowledge is a valuable asset in the Biopharmaceutical Industry (BI) as the growing market of biopharmaceuticals increases the need for company specific competitive advantage. Hence, knowledge dissemination is required to maintain expert knowledge in the company. Especially in the technology transfer (TT) field it is important due to the organisation’s need to be fast, agile and flexible in switching manufacturing schedules to serve project timelines or market needs. Another relevant purpose of a TT is the scaling up of manufacturing capacities for the biopharmaceuticals to be the first on the market with a sufficient amount of drug product. During these transfers, the knowledge transfer is often biased toward codified or explicit knowledge. The tacit component, however, needs more attention, because both types of knowledge are required for a successful technology transfer. Incomplete knowledge transfers, in which only one type of knowledge is provided, are a consistent problem and may lead to delays in timelines of biopharmaceutical projects.
Hence, in order to make TTs more robust, the visibility of tacit knowledge in the BI needs to be strengthened. This is in line with the call in the literature to contextualize tacit knowledge more. In addition, research on how tacit knowledge can be transferred and measured should be conducted. The known practices to disseminate knowledge are influenced by a variety of factors like e.g. trust between the different parties or power relations in the group. Different authors suggest to explore these context dependent influencing factors for the tacit knowledge transfer and the knowledge transfer in general in more detail.

Therefore, the research study “Identifying required tacit knowledge and influencing factors of technology transfers - A case study of a biotech manufacturing process transfer from Germany to the US” aimed to explore and identify the types of tacit knowledge used during a TT in the BI, as well as the influences and corresponding mechanisms and practices to support the tacit knowledge dissemination and knowledge sharing during a TT in general. The types of tacit knowledge were explored by conducting semi-structured expert interviews. In order to identify influencing factors for the knowledge dissemination in general, the data from the semi-structured interviews was used. Influences on the tacit knowledge dissemination have been discovered during the analysis of the focus group discussions. Practices and mechanisms to disseminate knowledge were derived from the semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions as well. The data analysis for both interview-based method types was chosen according to answer the research questions. Hence, content analysis, thematic analysis and causal mapping were used to address the objectives of this study.

When analysing the types of tacit knowledge used during a TT in the BI, 63 types of tacit knowledge in line with the epitomes of tacit knowledge (ETK) list from Haldin-Herrgard (2003) could be identified. Additional 7 types of tacit knowledge specific to the BI were found and were used to enlarge the list provided by Haldin-Herrgard (2003). With the same data set also synonyms used in the BI for different ETKs were added. This helped to contextualize the ETKs for the BI. To understand how these types of tacit knowledge and knowledge in general are transferred in order to strengthen the TT, the study looked for influences that support the dissemination. 32 groups of influences and single influences had been identified during the analysis of the semi-structured interviews, as well as the focus group discussions. Influences in the areas of team structure and characteristic, company structure and motivation to disseminate knowledge, as well as culture, were found. Having worked out the types of tacit knowledge and influences on knowledge dissemination, the study also carved out practices and tools supporting the dissemination of knowledge. After having analysed the data from the semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and the literature review, 30 practices and methods could be identified that can be used to support the knowledge transfer during a TT. Overall, the gained insights from this study helped to broaden the understanding of tacit knowledge used and the influences for the knowledge transfer during a TT in the Biopharmaceutical Industry in order to help make TTs more robust. In addition, they set a basis for future research.