Chapter 18: Leveraging Knowledge Assets in Firms of the Digital Era | Social and Economic Transformation in the Digital Era

Gregoris Mentzas
National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Dimitris Apostolou
Planet Ernst & Young, Greece

Abstract

The management of organisational knowledge can be a key lever for improving performance, boosting productivity and creativity, and facilitating innovation in corporate settings. The commonly used approaches for managing knowledge followed one of two perspectives: the process-centric (a primarily people-based approach that treats knowledge management as a social communication process) and a product-centric approach (that is mostly content-based and focuses on knowledge-related artifacts). This chapter presents a strategic management approach and an integrated solution that are knowledge asset-based and attempt to fuse the aforementioned two approaches in a balanced manner. The overall approach builds upon and extends the resource-based view of the firm by explicitly treating knowledge assets as the main driver for innovation and learning. The approach is demonstrated with a case study that focuses on the knowledge networks of a software firm.