[npunt]

I've never found a term I liked for this particular concept at the intersection of education & business so I made one up a while back:

A Knowledge Pool is the reservoir of shared knowledge that a group of people have about a particular subject, tool, method, etc. In product strategy, knowledge pools represent another kind of moat, and a form of leverage that can be used to grow or maintain market share.

Usage: Resources are better spent on other things besides draining the knowledge pool with yet another new interface to learn and spending time and money filling it up again with retraining.

[bsenftner]

The formal term that business people use is "institutional knowledge".

[handfuloflight]

Now it's just... context.

[RyanHamilton]

The term is Institutional knowledge. "An organization's collective memory, encompassing the unique expertise, experiences, processes, and cultural insights built over time by its members, acting as a vital asset that guides operations, decision-making, and continuity, often residing in seasoned employees' tacit understanding but also in documented procedures and data. It includes deep technical skills..."

[npunt]

Institutional knowledge is scoped to members of an organization and covers things related specifically to the institution's operations. What I'm talking about is the knowledge of the general population, often as it relates to an institution's products.

For instance, tons of people know how to use Adobe products like Photoshop, by way of deliberate inaction on the part of Adobe around product piracy outside of workplaces. With this large knowledge pool entering into the workforce, users were able to convince workplaces to adopt Adobe products that they were already familiar with.

That wouldn't be institutional knowledge, but a pool of knowledge that institutions could take actions (or inaction, as the case above) to influence.