Citation
Rollet, A. (Mai 2025). KNOWLEDGE FLOW MANAGEMENT IN THE METAVERSE. Management et Datascience, 9(4). https://management-datascience.org/articles/53215/.
L'auteur
Anne Rollet
(anne.rollet@univ-amu.fr) - Aix-Marseille Université, FEG, CRET-LOG - ORCID : 0000-0002-5429-9680
Copyright
© 2025 l'auteur. Publication sous licence Creative Commons CC BY-ND.
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Le ou les auteurs déclarent ne pas avoir connaissance de conflit d'intérêts impliqués par l'écriture de cet article.
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Le ou les auteurs déclarent ne pas avoir bénéficié de financement pour le travail mis en jeu par cet article.
Aperçu
In the “knowledge economy” boosted by technological advances, the speed of innovation, and other factors, knowledge can no longer be considered and treated as a “stock”. Industry 4.0 can gain from conceiving production and skill maintenance in terms of knowledge flow. This expert opinion is based on the values and skills of the ecosystem surrounding the company Immersive-CoLab, and examines the Collaborative Metaverse, its tools and its methods to support a flow-based approach in order to renew skill management in organizations. The advantages and disadvantages of this solution are presented, together with consideration of the necessary acculturation and learning creativity through “Do It Yourself”.
Contenu
This expert opinion considers the problem of our understanding of changes in the role of knowledge for industry 4.0, to encourage skill updating – seeing skills as an assemblage of knowledge and approaching the problem from the author’s position as a scientific advisor to Immersive Co-Lab, a company headed by Pierre-Yves Perez. The author’s role consisted not only of contributing scientific knowledge, but also of actively participating in the construction of Immersive Co-Lab’s technological service offering. The problem-solving methodology here thus focuses on technological matters and the company’s values. The characteristics of the Collaborative Metaverse are presented with references to research centers specializing in cognition and logistics management, and educational engineering through collaboration via Reciprocal Knowledge Exchange Networks (Réseaux d’Echanges Réciproques de Savoirs in France) and Freirian Empowerment Education (2). To meet the needs of its Industry 4.0 customers, the Immersive-CoLab puts the accent on the knowledge assemblage phase to envisage suitable conditions for management of intra- and inter-organizational knowledge flow (3). Reflection on the advantages and disadvantages of this proposition then considers the question of scientific and technological support for industry 4.0 in the necessary acculturation steps (4). This real-life experience of a response to a shift in the knowledge paradigm concludes by considering the prospects for artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies.
The problem: the changing role of knowledge flow in skill updating
The conception of skill production and maintenance in industry 4.0 must incorporate the fact that knowledge is volatile, fragile and perishable. Regular updating of skills is becoming essential, but all too often employees find they have no up-to-date technical documents.
New markets, emerging demands, changing laws, and other factors are also causing great disruption. Businesses find themselves having to consider new knowledge in interaction with other knowledge that may be still valid or in need of updating and must also co-construct with their ecosystem. Given these new characteristics of knowledge, constant vigilance is needed to cope with the resulting complexity. Knowledge must no longer be approached as a stock, but as flow.
The essential actor in these learning strategies is the individual, whether that individual is an employee or the head of a company. An individual updates their skills at work by drawing on a portfolio of knowledge. The updating effort requires motivation in employees, who need to seek knowledge from their company’s ecosystem, but also from their communities of practice and communities of interest. Individuals are the drivers of the process, because the skills belong to them: vigilance and the search for knowledge, but also knowledge capitalization and transfer, depend on their determination and efforts.
Every business leader, every manager is aware that knowledge can no longer be considered to belong to the company. Also, as well as maintaining employees’ knowledge flow, the company must contribute to updating its partners’ knowledge flows, because customers want more than a one-time solution, they also want to be able to contribute to the knowledge flow.
Since skills in a company are no longer supported by stable knowledge but by evolving, volatile, plural knowledge, “how can knowledge flow be managed?” In this article I present a specific methodology that is proposed by the Immersive-CoLab ecosystem and respects its values and capitalizes on its skills.
A methodology to approach knowledge as flow
This methodology section presents an analysis of requirements (2.1), then discusses the specific problematizations of the knowledge assemblage phase (2.2).
Analysis of the knowledge flow requirements of Industry 4.0
The skill updating needed for Industry 4.0 involves only knowledge, but also management of the disruption caused by new interactions within a portfolio of knowledge. The technical and human complexity inherent to Industry 4.0 requires continuous motivation, because it is likely that once a skill is updated, the vigilance process will probably have to continue and address other knowledge shortcomings.
The necessity of knowledge flow management is thus an essential part of management to maintain updated skills over time while encouraging individual motivation to stay alert to new developments, search for knowledge, and work on cognitive and operational assimilation.
The resources needed for knowledge assemblage are technical and human in nature. Expert analysis shows that it is necessary to have the right behaviours and motivation to capture the wealth of a knowledge flow, and that an approach focusing on logistics and supply chain management is important.
Regarding human behaviours, four aspects appear to be particularly important:
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- Vigilance and attentiveness: learners must be on the alert if they are to perceive shortcomings in their knowledge, and this must enable them to respond proactively to the emergence of new knowledge in their community…
- Discussion and communication: through written and oral exchanges between actors offering and seeking knowledge, learners must be able to encourage each individual’s reflexivity and thus set in motion a process of decontextualization and recontextualization…
- Co-construction: learners must be able to do more than just talk to each other; they must also share and develop contributions to solutions, or entire solutions, bearing in mind that the members of a community are sometimes competitors…
- Assemblage of diverse knowledge: learners must be able to perform individual work involving a great deal of trial and error, and to connect their new knowledge to other knowledge in their personal knowledge portfolio in order to attain a new coherence and support their company’s value creation process.
Regarding technical factors, two aspects are key:
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- Reliable knowledge quality: the person seeking knowledge must be reassured as regards its origin, history, lifespan and freshness (knowledge soon loses effectiveness because the context of its use is fast-changing). Also, customer specifications may formally require certain knowledge, and that raises the question of the legal liability of the solution provider…
- Organization of traceability between the actors respectively seeking and offering knowledge: a space must be found that is conductive to sharing knowledge in a climate of trust and creativity. Since the actors are often involved in complex dynamics of partnership and competition, the integrity of this space is particularly important.
Problematization of the knowledge assemblage phase and knowledge flow management
For a more objective view, the following question must be asked about the complex problems facing Industry 4.0: “How can knowledge flow management be exercised for optimum skill support?”
Knowledge flow management needs to take every stage of knowledge assemblage into consideration, and guarantee traceability of the knowledge.
Bonnet and Lièvre (2014) outline the key points of a logistics (supply chain) approach that can be used to manage the knowledge flow needed to keep skills effective:
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- Knowledge is not a tangible, storable resource.
- Knowledge relates to a praxeology (Piaget, 1972), enacted competence associated with “embodied competence” and “situated social practices” in which the action’s context and personalization are essential.
- Skills are constantly in construction.
- A flow-based approach to knowledge requires a conception in terms of communities of interest and practice.
- Codification of knowledge (into a code book for example) is not enough: interpersonal interaction must be designed to develop expertise.
Although the skill belongs to the individual, in this flow-based approach it is essential to grasp the vision of the company leaders who are in charge of encouraging and supporting these knowledge flow. Given the issues facing Industry 4.0, it may be interesting to focus on the options offered by Immersive-CoLab’s Collaborative Metaverse service offering: “How and in what conditions can the Collaborative Metaverse encourage knowledge flow management”?
There are two essential requirements:
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- The Collaborative Metaverse must facilitate interpersonal exchanges in a multi-user community, while encouraging respect of the principles of reciprocity and equal status, and
- To encourage the creation of a “third place” for motivated, mutually supportive employees, the Collaborative Metaverse must provide spaces for sharing and confidentiality that are conducive to value creation for the company.
The Collaborative Metaverse, a customized solution service offering for knowledge flow management
This section on the Collaborative Metaverse covers the collaborative technologies involved (3.1), then discusses the dynamics that can encourage learning behaviour (3.2) before presenting an example of an “emancipatory” digital twin (3.3).
Immersive-CoLab’s collaborative technologies
Immersive-CoLab was set up in 2016 in partnership with the LEST/CNRS research centre. It has developed a Metaverse, a permanent immersive virtual reality installation with spaces, protocols and tools that use immersive digital technologies derived from online games and active learning. This immersive virtual reality technology is focused on the aim of supporting dynamics of change, under a logic of creativity and learning. Each user is represented by an avatar and this encourages augmentation of their real cognitive and sensorial capacities; Yee and Bailenson (2007) mention the Proteus effect. The relationship between the avatar and the actor stimulates empowerment (Bacqué and Biewener, 2013), or the motivation necessary to “be able to act”.
With the support of five university research centres (Gadille & Perez, 2020; Rollet & Perez, 2022), this incubator for managerial collaboration and educational experiments provides management and training support by leasing out customized equipped spaces. This Collaborative Metaverse concentrates on learning through collaboration, drawing on the tools and methods of Freirian Empowerment Education and Reciprocal Knowledge Exchange Networks (Héber-Suffrin Claire and Marc, 2012). Reciprocity and equal status foster the trust and curiosity that are needed for co-construction of innovative responses to problems, and for creativity. This aim is both managerial and political (Sainsaulieu, 1992).
The materialization of conceptual objects such as augmented reality through digital twins or design thinking is a very useful facilitator for structuring knowledge sharing and elicitation. Through use of these tools in the Metaverse, the brain can visualize individual and collective skills. Setting out evidence of skills in this way lays a sound foundation for developing complex collaborations.
As a space for both confidentiality and sharing, multi-user immersive 3D platforms encourage communities of practice and communities of interest to develop and thrive, providing permanent environments able to offer a “reflexive user experience” over a period long enough for co-construction and active capitalization of knowledge.
Every customer – whether a company, a group of companies, or a training provider – is treated as a project, in order to offer a customized service. Immersive-CoLab’s values support learners’ trajectories by giving concrete form to their participation, with the aim of encouraging emancipation, supporting motivation and helping to develop empowerment. The technology underlying this approach is called DAVEI®, standing for Dynamique Avatariale de l’Environnement Immersif or Avatarial Immersive Environment Dynamic (cf. Figure 1)
Figure 1: The Immersive Co-Lab platform, a network for confidentiality and sharing using the DAVEI technology
It is now necessary to gain a better understanding of how this service offering can help to meet the knowledge flow needs of Industry 4.0.An avatar-based dynamic to encourage learning behaviours
Before considering Immersive-CoLab’s service offering, it is important to present the potential of the Collaborative Metaverse in each phase of learning:
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- Phase 1: building trust. –The whole learning dynamic begins with an encounter and discussion between two participants in a community space. The community of interest and practice (in interaction with other communities) develops knowledge flow, and its continuous exchanges constitute its raison d’être and give it a long-term existence. The Collaborative Metaverse platform thus encourages behaviours that will be able to capture the wealth of knowledge flow: vigilance and attentiveness, discussion and sharing, co-construction and assemblage, legitimization and capitalization. The participants become Learners, both offering and seeking knowledge, engaged in an interpersonal but also a community dynamic that demonstrates their ability to pass on and construct valuable knowledge.
- Phase 2: supporting the production of individual knowledge cards The director of the Immersive-CoLab has a great deal of experience in helping people formally express skills and adapts his method to suit the audience. Writing an individual knowledge card listing the knowledge they can offer is a way for each participant to develop their reflexivity; writing an individual knowledge card stating the knowledge they are interested in acquiring can immediately enhance their understanding of the problem and its context. These cards are pinned up in the community space, which is an act of self-certification of the reliability of the knowledge presented. The Collaborative Metaverse facilitates 3D representations where the user’s avatar can “play”, moving its knowledge around for a better grasp of the dimensions of its knowledge portfolio.
- Phase 3: exchanges between “suppliers and demanders” of knowledge The reliability of knowledge quality is self-certified by the community, which supports the traceability of “living” knowledge that is kept alive by the flow-based approach. This “certification” of knowledge quality takes place through discussions between suppliers and demanders. Self-certification is essential for the legitimacy of the community and of each participant. Knowledge exchange is organized to suit the two parties involved, and this entails a risk of knowledge loss which is inherent to sharing between participants. To prove that they intend to remain an honourable member of the community, they may express their appreciation of the knowledge exchange using a star rating or a comment such as “User Generated Content”.
The Collaborative Metaverse contributes to the community’s emergence, structuring, development and renewal, encouraging the quest for learning. Emergence and structuring is driven by actors who do not know each other but want to share a common immersive experience. Development can benefit an existing company which joins the platform and wants to develop new learning trajectories to engage its employees. Renewal can for example take the form of more open interactions with other communities already active on the platform.
Example of an “empowering” digital twin as a space for knowledge flow management
The value proposition of the Collaborative Metaverse for Industry 4.0 is expressed in its aim to “create an internal activity for the client rather than designing and delivering a finished product” (interview with P-Y Perez, 2024). This service facilitates acculturation and “Do It Yourself” which enhances autonomous learning and knowledge capitalization through the use of dedicated tools and spaces. It is essential to “guarantee client control of the parameters, in compliance with the GDPR” (interview with P-Y Perez, 2024).
Two principal types of virtual modelling are possible: a digital twin as a virtual model of an existing process, or a ”hypervision” approach consisting of upstream virtual elaboration of a physical object – this second approach can detect adjustments to be made as early as the design phase, to increase efficiency in the physical construction phase.
Experience has shown that for the best possible grasp of acculturation and “Do It Yourself”, three stages are necessary after the educational, strategic and technological approach to the customer’s needs:
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- A technological stage which is fairly directive, in which the Immersive-CoLab team shows participants the space prepared for them based on their company’s stated needs and a customized translation of its desire to manage knowledge flow. After a certain period of use during which acculturation has been demonstrably achieved, participants may find the space provided too restrictive and will then want to reorganize their working and thinking systems, for example by adding places for debates.
- A participatory stage of “Do It Yourself”, supported by the Immersive-CoLab team, to foster intra- or inter-organizational co-construction with principles of reciprocity and equal status. Ideas can thus be materialized and shared.
- An empowering stage once the participants are more mature, generating a virtuous circle that combines empowerment with creativity. Input from the original creator of the model is now no longer necessary, and the participants have control over the development of their object of work and thought.
The Collaborative Metaverse’s digital twins have characteristics specific to their mode of construction, which is concentrated in the third of the above stages, the stage of empowerment. Participants in the Collaborative Metaverse – company leaders or operational employees – can make changes to the digital twin, for instance suggesting that a camera should be added for better detection of “leaks”. The participants can now undertake the trial and error necessary for co-construction without assistance, and personalise their digital twin: the objective of the support provided by the Immersive Co-Lab is precisely to make platform participants autonomous. Allowing the actors concerned to improve their representation is good for self-confidence, self-efficiency (Bandura, 2019) and expression of their skills to colleagues.
Meanwhile, the management dashboard and performance indicators are adjusted according to the different participants’ needs.
The digital twin is thus not just a way to transfer orders, record activities and monitor work by the operational employees, but a tool for the individual and collective skill dynamic.
Advantages and disadvantages of the Collaborative Metaverse technical service offering
There are two obvious difficulties:
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- The need to provide support for acculturation and “Do It Yourself” experimentation Customization each equipped space in the Collaborative Metaverse requires several time-consuming steps from the outset to give customers support for acculturation and learning all the options offered by “Do It Yourself”. Many Industry 4.0 customers are unfamiliar with the full potential of the Metaverse. Clearly stating the initial demand, introducing a process of eliciting knowledge from the customer and the relevant customer employees, and personalising wage trajectories for learning, ultimately provide a good grasp of the potential offered the avatarial dynamic.
- The cost of deep, transformative learning that fosters empowerment For change management, companies might prefer simpler approaches (hiring a consultant, training, using a collaborative but non-immersive platform) that are also less costly. Deciding to use a Collaborative Metaverse installation can bring about significant change in employees as they “learn how to learn”, thus updating their skills as part of the company’s value chain.
Prospective and Conclusion
In the Collaborative Metaverse, knowledge flow management in a community promotes interpersonal exchanges and supports the role of the company’s leader.
Here as in the whole of the economic world, artificial intelligence is providing a glimpse of many new types of innovation. With its ability to build on all discussions and writings – subject to the employees’ consent – AI can propose ways to update knowledge. And in the community space, it can encourage interactions between the suppliers and demanders of knowledge.
Blockchain technologies are another avenue, for example to support professional certifications that can be earned directly on digital twins.
Bibliographie
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- Bonnet Emmanuel et Lièvre Pascal, 2014, Repenser la logistique à partir du management des connaissances. Le cas d’une mission au sein de la Mars Desert Research Station. « Management & Avenir, vol.°1, n°67, p. 224 à 242.
- Courtois Bernadette et Pineau Gaston, 1991, La formation expérientielle des adultes, Paris, la Documentation française.
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Sainsaulieu Renaud, 1977, L’identité au travail, Les effets culturels de l’organisation, Presses de la FNSP, Paris. - Yee Nick, Bailenson Jeremy, 2007, The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self- Representation on Behavior, Human Communication Research, vol. 33, no3, p. 271– 90
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0000-0002-5429-9680
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Aix-Marseille Université, FEG, CRET-LOG
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