Strategic Capabilities and Knowledge Transfer Within and Between Organizations


Book Description

'A remarkably insightful collection of contributions, combining the strategy capability and the knowledge creation and sharing perspectives. Very useful reading for the serious scholar.' - Yves L. Doz, INSEAD, France This volume is the imaginative outcome of several international strategy scholars who have cultivated original research on the broad relationship between strategic capabilities and knowledge transfer at both intra- and inter-organizational levels.




ECKM2014-Proceedings of the 15th European conference on Knowledge Management


Book Description

The world economy in which we are living poses challenges that lead to a realization that 'more of the same' will be difficult to sustain. This provides an illustration that, in order to create new or modified knowledge practices, strengthen customer relationships and thus positively influence customer satisfaction, organizations must be flexible in configuring (combining) knowledge and knowledge structures in a way that is appropriate for delivering value to the customer. It must simultaneously develop effective strategies for updating the knowledge of its staff members necessary for underpinning the creation and delivery of appropriate knowledge services. Thus, unlearning (forgetting) becomes a critical means for organizational success. The ECKM community of scholars has already initiated dialogue that links its particular strengths to innovation issues. This conference aims to further that dialogue by attracting leading edge work that leverages the ECKM community's in-depth understanding of learning and unlearning to better understand knowledge management. Our aim is to stimulate breakthrough research streams linking learning, unlearning and knowledge management. How can organizations tailor, use, and extend techniques and tools from knowledge management for improving their business practices and processes? Building upon existing work on knowledge management (KM) and organizational learning, the conference will promote interdisciplinary approaches from computer science and information systems, business, management and organization science as well as cognitive science. Emphasis will be put on systematic learning from experience, KM tools and KM success factors. A special interest belongs to knowledge management initiatives which are lightweight (i.e., do not place considerable additional burden on users and KM experts), allow an incremental adoption (i.e., do not require large up-front investment before any return of investment is at least visible), and are flexible regarding frequent changes in experts and topics. Continuing the success of the ECKM conference series since 2000, the 2015 conference will provide an international communication forum bringing together academia and industry for discussing the progress made and addressing the challenges faced by continuous learning in knowledge-intensive organizations.




Organizational Networks


Book Description

Drawing on the wealth of insights into organizational life accumulated over the past few decades, this collection takes stock of the foundations of research in this area, examines the status of the current work and identifies future directions for the field. Topics covered include theoretical and methodological foundations; social capital; strong ties, weak ties and structural holes; small worlds/network structures; centrality and power; social networks of entrepreneurship; identity, cognition and individual differences in social networks; and network dynamics.




Knowledge Sharing in Research Collaborations


Book Description

Based on a large-scale survey, Benjamin Niedergassel identifies several factors enhancing or inhibiting knowledge sharing in research collaborations. He uses these factors to derive practical implications for academia, industry and research policy




Knowledge Transfer and Technology Diffusion


Book Description

This important book is about the origins and diffusion of innovation, in theory and in practice. The practice draws on a variety of industries, from electronics to eyewear, from furniture to mechatronics, in a range of economies including Europe, USA and China.







The 19th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management


Book Description

The International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management is sponsored by the Chinese Industrial Engineering Institution, CMES, which is the only national-level academic society for Industrial Engineering. The conference is held annually as the major event in this arena. Being the largest and the most authoritative international academic conference held in China, it provides an academic platform for experts and entrepreneurs in the areas of international industrial engineering and management to exchange their research findings. Many experts in various fields from China and around the world gather together at the conference to review, exchange, summarize and promote their achievements in the fields of industrial engineering and engineering management. For example, some experts pay special attention to the current state of the application of related techniques in China as well as their future prospects, such as green product design, quality control and management, supply chain and logistics management to address the need for, amongst other things low-carbon, energy-saving and emission-reduction. They also offer opinions on the outlook for the development of related techniques. The proceedings offers impressive methods and concrete applications for experts from colleges and universities, research institutions and enterprises who are engaged in theoretical research into industrial engineering and engineering management and its applications. As all the papers are of great value from both an academic and a practical point of view, they also provide research data for international scholars who are investigating Chinese style enterprises and engineering management.




Trust Building and Boundary Spanning in Cross-Border Management


Book Description

This edited book addresses two critical issues in international management: building trust and managing boundary spanning activities between international business partners. The duel-process of internationalization of multinational corporations (MNCs), through globalisation and regionalisation, has helped MNCs to increase their market expansion and improve the capabilities of innovation and learning. By creating various forms of international strategic alliances (ISAs), MNCs have become structurally more complex and geographically more dispersed. As a result, MNCs in general and ISAs in particular face the challenges of discerning blurred organisational boundaries, reconfiguring the control mechanisms, integrating diversified resources, and coordinating distributed activities in time and space. Research in organisation behaviour indicates that boundary spanners play critical yet unspecified roles and functions in managing cross-boundary relationships. A core boundary spanning function is to build trust relationships. When organisations engage in business transactions, members of the organisations are concerned with not only the outcomes of economic transactions but also the processes of social exchanges. Boundary spanners may succeed in building interpersonal trust in a partnership, nonetheless their effort may not lead to inter-partner trust without an effective implementation of the institutionalisation process. Whereas trustworthiness is the antecedent to trust providing the basis for trust to develop, distrust manifests itself as a separate and linked concept to trust. These dynamic features of trust, trustworthiness, and distrust are critically elaborated. Trust Building and Boundary Spanning in Cross-Border Management is dedicated to explicating these under-researched themes and contributing to the emerging streams of research in micro foundations and micro-structural approaches. It illustrates the latest research on the topic and will be of interest to both students at an advanced level, academics and reflective practitioners in the fields of organisational behaviour and theory, strategic management, international strategy and strategic alliances.




Innovation Capabilities: Affirming an Oxymoron?


Book Description

The relationship between resources and capabilities and performance has been discussed since Edith Penrose addressed the mechanisms behind the growth of the firm (Penrose, 1959). Early contributions to this area of research suggest that valuable and inimitable resources and capabilities are the primary sources of superior performance and sustained competitive advantage (Barney, 1991; Wernerfelt, 1984), while more recent contributions suggest that the ability to change and re-configure resources and capabilities (dynamic capabilities) are the most important for performance, especially when the market is unstable (Teece, 2014; Teece, Pisano & Shuen, 1997). It has also been argued that firms may utilize their resources and capabilities through the development of innovations in the form of new products, services or processes (Hill, Brandeau, Truelove & Lineback, 2015), and empirical research has confirmed that there is a positive relationship between the implementation of innovation activities and the future performance of firms (Bowen, Rostami & Steel, 2010; Rubera & Kirca, 2012). However, innovation as a phenomenon entails change, as opposed to resources and capabilities that represents a firm’s ability to reproduce a certain performance – and as such involves stability. Viewed in this way the very term innovation capability can constitute an oxymoron. The study of innovation capabilities is therefore a complex field of study that is emerging. The topic has already attracted interest from a number of scholars (e.g. Forsman, 2011; Guan & Ma, 2003; Hertog, van der Aa & de Jong, 2010; Wang, Lu & Chen, 2008; Yam, Lo, Tang & Lau, 2011), but despite these important advances there is still a lack of consensus in the literature and a pressing need to clarify what type of resources and capabilities drive innovation in different contexts (Lidija & Robert, 2014), and how these capabilities are developed and utilized (Helfat & Peteraf, 2003).




Knowledge Emergence


Book Description

This book brings together the research of a number of scholars in the field of knowledge creation and imparts a sense of order to the field. The chapters share three characteristics: they are all grounded in extensive qualitative and/or quantitative research; they all go beyond the mere description of the knowledge-creation process and offer both theoretical and strategic implications; they share a view of knowledge creation and knowledge transfer as delicate processes, necessitating particular forms of support from managers.