Conclusion


The management of organizational knowledge has drawn the attention of academics, consultants, and practitioners as a key lever for improving performance, boosting productivity and creativity, and facilitating innovation in organizational settings. The methods, tools, and the actual KM implementations in various companies have mainly followed one of two perspectives, which in this chapter we called the process-centric and the product-centric approaches. The former is primarily people-based and treats KM as a social communication process; the latter is mostly content-based and focuses on knowledge-related artifacts.

In this chapter we presented a knowledge-asset-based approach that fuses these two perspectives in a balanced manner. Our 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 integration of the product- and process-centric approaches can be seen in the case presented. The case of Delta-Singular demonstrates how both the process approach (i.e., dealing with knowledge networks) and the product approach (i.e., dealing with knowledge as an object that is consumed or produced during R&D projects) can interoperate in practice.

It is important to stress that our approach aims to ensure that both the process-centric view and the product-centric perspective can interoperate, in the sense that they are not isolated from one another, and that one can make use and add value to the other. The aim is not—and should not be—for all organizations to try to excel in both approaches at equal proportions. Such an attempt may not be in line with the business environment and could be overwhelming (in terms of resources and organizational and cultural changes needed) for an organization (Hansen et al., 1999).




Social and Economic Transformation in the Digital Era
Social and Economic Transformation in the Digital Era
ISBN: 1591402670
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 198

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