The grants-making enterprise is both knowledge-intensive and multi-organizational. Thus, improved intra- and inter-organizational knowledge creation, sharing, and management are critically important in enhancing effectiveness and supporting the ideal vision for grants-supported research. At present, no single discipline or research frame is adequate to study how knowledge is acquired, used, and shared. These frames include the social construction of knowledge and the sociology of science, organizational theory and organizational learning, the knowledge-based theory of organizations, and the technologies and methods known as knowledge management. While none of these is comprehensive, they do share some general concepts that are useful to describe and analyze the knowledge issues involved in the grants-making enterprise, they are:

• Explicit knowledge--which can be expressed and communicated in formal ways (such as through language, symbols, or images)
• Tacit knowledge--which is possessed and applied by a person but not fully expressed or communicated in formal terms
• Embedded knowledge-- which is expressed or captured in artifacts, groups, processes, or structures
• Knowing or knowledge-in-action--which refers to knowledge that is part of and expressed or shared through practice or activity.

Developing, sharing, and managing these forms of knowledge requires distinctive strategies and methods that reflect the important differences among them. The formal grants-making processes are most appropriate for and are often supported by formal mechanisms for collecting and working with explicit knowledge about policies, regulations, scientific programs, proposals, investigators, institutions, and activities. However, there are several unanswered research questions regarding how best to handle these explicit knowledge assets. These include how to build or expand formal institutional memory and make it accessible and usable. Additional research is needed to explore what semantic and ontological resources or tools are needed to integrate explicit knowledge across programs and disciplines. This research should include attention to what forms of learning and which knowledge-sharing mechanisms are best suited to the social structures and cultures of grants-making organizations and to the various discipline or practice communities within them.

Along with this substantial body of explicit knowledge, grants making requires subtle judgments and considerable tacit knowledge. In any grants-making organization, program staff have difficulty in delineating and codifying the tacit knowledge that is created and used in making complex judgments when working with investigators and reviewers. Research related to tacit knowledge should include attention to the kinds of tacit knowledge employed in seeking grants, in the scientific review process, and in grants management. It would also be useful to study the role of organizational factors, such as trust and communities of practice, on tacit knowledge sharing and management.

Even though it is not generally recognized, embedded knowledge plays an important part in much of the grants-making enterprise. Knowledge is embedded in review procedures, information systems, and in many of the group processes that are characteristic of the enterprise. It would be useful for research related to embedded knowledge to explore how knowledge about grants making becomes embedded in organizational processes and cultures, and under what conditions or forms embedded knowledge acts as valuable institutional memory or as an impediment to innovation. The knowledge content of some activity may be formalized and explicit (e.g., how to solicit proposals) but others may be much less so (e.g., how to conduct a review panel, or how to evaluate the scientific merit of an idea).