POESYS

During my time at Synergetics, an employability process company, we constructed numerous context ontologies. Basically they served as a formal foundation for grounding competencies: generic competencies + context = meaningful and ‘interoperable’ competencies. Examples are context ontologies of the NedCar automotive plant and the laboratory environment of the Hogeschool Ghent. Both companies were struggling to implement the top-down generic competency models, style SHL. By giving them a semantic grounding all internal and external stakeholders could understand and collaborate around these models and above all, identify key differences between their model and those of external stakeholders. By shedding clarity on how the competency models were used in a certain context, organisations narrowed the room for personal interpretation of the models. An outcome of this was for example the identification of ‘competency gaps’ between the offer of the curriculum of Hogeschool Ghent and industry demand.

But were they truly ‘context ontologies’? In his much-cited work about the knowledge-creating enterprise, Nonaka describes context, and with it the concept of ‘ba’ (which roughly means a place, or context in motion), as multifaceted at best and generally volatile. ‘Ba’ is where knowledge is created within the enterprise and where the dialectic process takes place. In another paper that tries to elaborate the concept of context a bit starting from Nonaka’s insights, the authors state that context is inherently personal, although in some cases it intersects with other peoples’ contexts. What we have done at Synergetics, was actually extracting ‘ideal types’ from context, which are types that claim general validity and are shared amongst people. Problem is that this increase in anonymity implies a decrease in fullness of the content.

Just like tacit knowledge becomes more relevant in less formalised situations, perhaps this is the case for the underlying competencies as well. Perhaps it is not possible to formalise the ‘application’ of competencies enough because the ontology engineering lag of such a granular ontology would make it unmaintainable (or rather, unprofitable) and the degree of individuality of context would simply make a context ontology irrelevant on a shared level (because the real grounding of competencies should take place on those non-shared levels which are not on the level of ‘ideal types’).

I guess in the end the question is one of pragmatism: is the (non-shared) level of the individual even relevant for a context ontology? Yes, if you truly want to represent meaningful competencies (where they are really situated). No, if you are happy to compare competency models on the ‘ideal type’ level inter- or intra-organisationally even if it may be somewhat a stretch from what is really going on. But then we arrive once more at the problem of personal interpretation of the models.

The IWT (the main Flemish institute for research funding) has released a much-awaited new funding scheme, which will allow companies and universities to cooperate around a PhD project.

The Baekeland programme aims to offer researchers the opportunity to finish a doctoral degree at a Flemish university (or a knowledge institute that works with an academic supervisor) in close cooperation with industry. The programme provides co-financing of individual mandates, including the funding of operational costs associated with the project.

A basic principle of the Baekeland mandates is that on one hand a Flemish company is responsible for co-financing the research project and defining its strategic objectives, whilst on the other hand a Flemish university is responsible for managing the doctorate and granting a degree in accordance with the high Flemish educational quality standards.

The funding is granted by the IWT as a project funding to the applicant company. The company needs to have an agreement with the researcher’s host institution.

This program fills a real void in current funding schemes and offers a means for companies to attract relatively cheap, motivated and smart talent. The importance for innovation in Flanders should not be underestimated, as it will also directly contribute to applicability of research results. In my time at Synergetics, Luk Vervenne and I have talked to the Flemish government on a number of occasions in which we pointed out this void (and apparently we were not the only ones). Glad to see something has been done about that now. More information (in Dutch) about the programme can be found here (PDF).