shared and almost by definition is embedded in and inseparable from an individual. Though elements of the specialist’s knowledge can be codified and easily shared, often much cannot be. Nanaka (1994) argues that such knowledge is rooted in the action, experience and involvement in a specific context and is comprised of both cognitive and technical elements. The cognitive element consists of mental maps, beliefs, paradigms and viewpoints while the technical consists of concrete know-how and skills that apply to a specific context (cited in Alavi and Leidner 2001). These are clearly not easily packaged. Although numerous books claim to have distilled the innovation secrets of Apple’s founder Steve Jobs, there appears no replacement for the accumulated experience, know-how and vision embedded in the man himself at the helm of the company. Steve Jobs is not codifiable.

There is clearly some relationship between the degree of routinization of knowledge and its codifiability—phone books easily communicate routinized knowledge. But the correspondence is clearly not one to one. Fundamental cellular medical research can be distilled to research papers and easily communicated. By contrast, a country doctor has in his mental tool kit a range of very well understood and communicated disease typologies, but there is no substitute for his accumulated experience and crystallized intelligence managing this typology when deciding which corresponds to a particular feverish child. The tacit knowledge of a superb country doctor is thus far from being routinizable or codifiable, which illustrates the fundamental point we want to make here—that tacit-explicit dimension of knowledge is quite independent of (non-reducible to) the abstract-routinized dimension of knowledge.

Here again, it is essential to note that “information,” in the sense of what is found on websites, corresponds only to the most explicit knowledge and excessive focus on this type of activity ignores the bulk of the knowledge space. Further, becoming the reference of choice for even this type of information requires that the Bank has a role in curating the massive amount of available material for quality and relevance.

# **3. The World Bank’s Niche in the Knowledge Space**

The mandate of the World Bank is to reduce poverty and advance development. Given that one of its intellectual founders, John Maynard Keynes, argued that it is ideas more than anything else that shape the course of history, what is perhaps surprising is that the vocation as a knowledge institution was not explicit from its founding. Indeed, in this section we emphasize that it is the Bank’s mandate that defines its comparative advantage in the knowledge space, and that the Bank is uniquely positioned to perform in this niche. We argue, more precisely, that there is no obvious substitute for the Bank in this regard, for the Bank draws its strength to perform well in that niche from a number of Bank-specific characteristics, including its ability to fruitfully link the global and local developmental lessons.

Knowledge related institutions of many types have evolved to fill particular niches in the knowledge space. Their design and character reflect where in the knowledge space their knowledge products and activities fall. Figure 2 attempts to crudely locate the World Bank relative to other knowledge institutions along the first two dimensions, leaving aside for now the “tacit vs. explicit” dimension. The World Bank’s knowledge services at present span, roughly, 6