Where does knowledge-based view collide?

The knowledge-based view holds that knowledge is the firm's most strategically important resource, and that the firm exists because it can integrate the specialized knowledge held by many individuals better than a market can. Grant's 1996 Toward a Knowledge-Based Theory of the Firm extended the resource-based view by treating knowledge, especially the tacit knowledge that is hard to buy or copy, as the resource that explains lasting advantage. Because each expert knows only a narrow slice, the firm's job is coordination: setting up rules, routines, and problem-solving groups that combine what specialists know without every person having to learn everything. Kogut and Zander's 1992 paper made a related case, arguing that firms are good at creating and recombining knowledge internally through what they called combinative capabilities. On this reading, organizational knowledge is a stock of expertise spread across people that the firm's structures pull together. The referent here is the firm as an integrator of knowledge it does not centralize, and the sibling meanings on this page carve the same words differently.[1][2]

Unit

A firm's ability to integrate expertise distributed across its specialists

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Inferred from coordinating structures and from advantage that rivals cannot imitate, rather than from a direct scale

In Nonaka's theory of organizational knowledge creation, organizational knowledge is not a stock to be integrated but a process of converting between two kinds of knowledge: tacit knowledge that people hold but struggle to put into words, and explicit knowledge that can be written down and shared. His 1994 A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation set out four modes of conversion, later summarized as SECI: socialization (tacit to tacit, learned through shared experience), externalization (tacit to explicit, put into words or models), combination (explicit to explicit, assembled into new systems), and internalization (explicit back to tacit, absorbed through practice). Knowledge is created as it spirals through these modes and moves outward from the individual to the group and the whole organization. The emphasis falls on generating new knowledge over time, not on holding or moving an existing stock. Where measurement is attempted, it looks at whether the modes are present rather than at a fixed quantity. This is a different object wearing the same words as the strategy meaning above.[3]

Unit

A cycle of conversion between tacit and explicit knowledge across people

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by whether the four conversion modes are present and by knowledge created over time

In the knowledge-management and knowledge-transfer literature, organizational knowledge is treated as something that can be stored and moved: held in an organization's members, its tools, and its routines, and passed from one unit to another. Argote and Ingram's 2000 Knowledge Transfer: A Basis for Competitive Advantage in Firms defined knowledge transfer as the process through which one unit is affected by the experience of another, and located knowledge in these reservoirs so that its movement could be tracked and measured. On this view the practical questions are whether knowledge can be captured, whether it survives the move, and whether the receiving unit's performance changes. This framing sits close to information-technology systems and organizational memory, where knowledge is documented, indexed, and retrieved. It treats knowledge as an asset with a location, in contrast with a resource to integrate or a spiral to create. The construct is operational: it is defined by whether performance improves when experience crosses a boundary.[4]

Unit

Knowledge held in members, tools, and routines that can move between units

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Tracked by whether a receiving unit's performance changes after experience is transferred