THE INTERGENERATIONAL KNOWLEDGE SHARING: AN ITALIAN CASE STUDY OF A PLATFORM FOR IMPROVING EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING

In a period of unprecedented technological and scientific advance, enterprises need to take a competitive advantage from knowledge management. A main challenge, especially for small and medium enterprises (SME), is balancing the knowledge reposing in the older workers' minds and the possibilities for young people to exploit their academic knowledge. This work highlights the necessity for SME to foster knowledge transfer and sharing between young and old people, avoiding losing their skills and tacit knowledge, encouraging a value co-creation. To facilitate the exchange of knowledge and experiences between these two generations, a possible solution could be to propose a common shared place, a combination of physical, virtual and mental area, as the concept called Ba in according with Nonaka (1998). Young and older workers can meet, work in team, learn by doing, share, transfer and improve their knowledge; consequently, if this happens, their employment is favoured or at least it is possible to limit their unemployment due to the lack of experience, upgrade and flexibility, respectively for younger and elder. At this aim, finally is proposed some intermediate results of a pilot project, that uses a specific technology for fostering the knowledge transfer process in the contest of Italian ICT firms. In this project, teams are created mixing young and old people; working together, they share the knowledge acquired in the past (respectively at school and on the job), co-create value for their improving and give better services to enterprises that employ them. This initiative has been experimented for 12 months and the first results are encouraging.