Knowledge Spreads Like Disease

Tacit knowledge dissemination through organizations follows epidemic dynamics. Knowledge “infects” people through contact, spreads along network connections, and, critically, the ability to transmit diminishes over time.

This isn’t just metaphor. The mathematical models that describe disease spread (Susceptible-Infectious models) produce realistic patterns of organizational knowledge distribution when applied to corporate networks.

The implication: knowledge capture is partly a network traversal problem, not just an elicitation problem.

Related: 06-atom—waning-knowledge-infectivity, 07-atom—informal-networks-knowledge-quality, 06-molecule—seci-framework