Journal of Digital Information Management H.M. ZHU, S.T. ZHANG, Y.J. LANG 13 6 2015 http://dline.info/fpaper/jdim/v13i6/v13i6_5.pdf In the era of knowledge economy, the success of industrial commodity production and business activities in an industrial enterprise mainly depends on the knowledge level of employees and the effectiveness of knowledge management. Thus, industrial enterprises encourage employees to spread and share useful knowledge and information with others. Tacit knowledge spreads among industrial enterprises mainly through employee mobility with such knowledge. We introduce a new approach to describe the spread of tacit knowledge using epidemic models. We model and simulate the peculiarities of tacit knowledge spreading between two industrial enterprises by considering employee mobility. This model is compared with the susceptible-infected-susceptible model. We analyze the effects of employee mobility on the spreading of tacit knowledge and provide numerical simulations to support our results. Results show that employee mobility and the average degree of the knowledge exchange network in each industrial enterprise significantly influence the spreading of tacit knowledge among industrial enterprises. A threshold that governs whether tacit knowledge can spread among industrial enterprises exists. The results of the numerical simulations and analyses can guide industrial enterprises to improve knowledge and information management with regard to the theoretical and practical aspects, as well as provide a valuable platform for further analyzing knowledge and information management.