Taking a Knowledge Perspective on Needs: Presenting Two Case Studies within an Educational Environment in Austria

Needs that are shared by members of an organization can trigger an organizational learning process. To a large extent, needs are implicitly anchored in organizations and people can hardly articulate them. In this article, we present Bewextra, a method that allows for identifying hidden needs in organizations. Thereby, we trigger a knowledge conversion process, which is similar to Nonaka’s SECI-spiral. In two case studies, we present how our Bewextra-process is applied to projects in educational contexts in Austria. In a first case study, we show that a combination of learning from past and future experiences extend the scope of the overall outcome. Since learning from future experiences requires a distinct environment (enabling spaces), we present a second case study. Here, we conducted a Bewextra-process with a large number of participants (n > 170), focusing on learning from future experiences.