Serious game to motivate the knowledge sharing among knowledge technicians in machinery relocation of foreign direct investment

The relocation of the old machinery to another countries, where the cost competitive advantage is still available, is widely practiced among the Multi National Enterprises (MNEs). Upon the relocation, the MNEs need to transfer the machinery maintenance knowledge in order to reinstallation and re-launch the production rightly, precisely and accurately. To the nearly end-of-life product, the machinery must be re-launched as fast as possible so that the MNEs will have more time to gain the profit. Therefore, the tacit knowledge of the machine experts is needed to be created and transformed into the explicit knowledge. Then, the technician community will be able to learn and handle the old machinery maintenance rapidly and correctly. However, without the motivation, the tacit knowledge elicitation is usually slow. Thus, this paper tries to propose a serious game as a motivation tool to quickly elicit the tacit knowledge. The case study of a Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Thailand was introduced. The result showed that the serious game had a significant impact to the knowledge creation process as well as to the business performance of the FDI.