Codified-tacit and general-specific knowledge in the division of labour among firms: A study of the software industry

This paper explores the organisation and codification of knowledge in software firms. It analyses various economic incentives to codification, including the need to improve the productivity and quality of software production and the networks of inter-firm alliances.The paper examines the experience of five Italian software firms specialising in software packages and services. It compares their capabilities, main sources of tacit knowledge, specific incentives to invest in knowledge codification and the formal development methodologies and quality control systems adopted. Finally, the paper analyses two distinct technological collaborations that two of these firms have recently established.     

The value creation cycle: moving towards a framework for knowledge management implementation

Researchers have emphasized on the need for advances in knowledge management (KM) research to better understand how organizations accrue benefits from their knowledge resources. Thus, an integrated approach, rooted in the theoretical streams of knowledge-based view, KM and institutional theory, is proposed to explain how a successful KM program creates value. The approach discusses four organizational capabilities that firms need to develop simultaneously to create KM-enabled value, and identifies possible organizational actions to develop these capabilities. Various feedback and feed-forward processes, originating inside as well as outside the firm, integrate these capabilities into a KM-enabled value creation cycle (VCC). Key propositions were developed, and were examined with the help of three case studies.     

The French defence industry in the knowledge management era: A historical overview and evidence from empirical data

In the defence industry the recent development of a ‘market for technology’, the creation of new European high-technology companies as well as transformations in government agencies have driven firms to reposition their technological and organizational skills. Our objective is to show that the transformations that have occurred in the past 10 years have not only redefined skills and the organization of production, but also have given a more strategic place to knowledge management (KM) practices. We provide a contextual and historical overview based on qualitative interviews, in order to better understand the relation between KM and innovative behaviour in this industry. We build an original industrial and technological database comprising various samples that provides quantitative information concerning KM and innovative practices. The results of the statistical analysis reveal the specificity of firms in this industry. Taking account of the size of these firms and their technological intensity, we show that the behaviour of defence industry firms in terms of KM practices, differs from that of other firms. This is evident from their technological performance, and innovation and patenting intensity. This structural tendency is explained as an innovative behaviour in the French national innovation system rather than merely a ‘trend’.     

Driving innovation: Public policy and human capital

Human capital, the set of skills, knowledge, capabilities and attributes embodied in people, is crucial to firms’ capacity to absorb and organize knowledge and to innovate. Research on human capital has traditionally focused on education and training. A concern with the motivationally-relevant elements of human capital such as employees’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and willingness to change in the workplace (all of which have been shown to drive innovation), has often been overlooked in economic research and by public policy interventions to date. The paper addresses this gap in two ways: First, by studying firms’ human resource systems that can enhance these elements of human capital, and second, using the results of this research as a springboard for a public policy program targeted at elements of human capital that have been ignored by traditional education and training interventions. Using a sample of 1070 employee-managers in Ireland, we apply a series of probit regressions to understand how different human resources systems influence the probability of employee-managers reporting the motivationally-relevant elements of human capital. The research: (1) Finds that respondents in organizations with certain human resource systems are more likely to report motivationally-relevant elements of human capital. Specifically, employee-managers in organizations with proactive work practices and that consult with their employee-managers increase the predicted probability of reporting that they are satisfied with their job, willing to change, and are committed to the organization; (2) Highlights the need to consider the role of policy interventions to support the motivationally-relevant elements of human capital; (3) Proposes a new policy program offer to support the motivationally-relevant elements of human capital in order to increase firms’ innovation activity.     

Developing capabilities in new ventures: a knowledge management approach

On the basis of a knowledge management perspective, this paper expands the literature on new ventures’ capabilities by considering how these firms fill knowledge gaps and develop the technological, marketing, management, and ICT capabilities they need to compete. In particular, this paper investigates the role of networks in these dynamics. Although new technology-based firms have great potential to introduce innovative products into the market, they might suffer from more critical knowledge gaps and capability weaknesses than established firms. The results of a quantitative investigation of an original data set of more than 400 Italian new ventures specializing in high-tech industries show that these firms acquire knowledge to support their capability growth mainly through the management of intense relations with multiple external sources of knowledge. In addition, capability development is supported by the variety of founders’ industry experience and the presence of young graduates among the founding team.     

A case analysis of knowledge sharing implementation and job searching in Malaysia

The aim of this research is to consider an analysis through case studies on how knowledge sharing may be successfully implemented. The study will clarify a conceptualisation that provides a new understanding of the relationship between unemployed graduates and the human capital concept. The cases adopted web documentation for the research technique, and an interpretive approach was used as the research paradigm. Two online recruitment agency sites were analysed through qualitative analysis. The connections show how knowledge sharing can be used as a medium to help unemployed graduates to get jobs through online recruitment agencies. High quality candidates must have good soft skills, problem-solving skills and employable value added skills to get the best jobs. The findings will be expressed as qualitative results from the two online recruitment agencies researched as the case studies for the paper. From these case studies, the findings will contribute to the ongoing study on how to implement knowledge sharing among undergraduates after they finished their studies.     

Strategic knowledge management failures in small professional service firms in China

In this paper, we report and reflect on Knowledge Management (KM) projects conducted in two China-based, smaller–sized professional service firms. The authors acted as Action Researchers, assisting each firm extensively as it prepared for its implementation of an IT-based KMS. However, neither KMS implementation significantly improved knowledge transfer or work productivity. We analyze the project failures, noting the significance of specific strategic management deficiencies as well as inadequate employee involvement and incentives. The implications for the strategic management of knowledge and organizational change in China are considered.     

Innovation in project-based firms: The context dependency of success factors

Innovation management literature typically concerns functionally organized firms. In this paper we investigate innovation management in a different type of firm, the project-based firm. Project-based firms, such as engineering and construction companies, consultancies and system integrators, are service firms that solely execute projects for clients. We focus on new service development projects in these firms. Based on an in-depth study of six projects in four different firms, we develop hypotheses on differences between success factors for development projects in project-based firms and in functionally organized firms. Some of the success factors for functionally organized firms, as described in the literature, appear to be more important in project-based firms, others seem redundant. Our findings suggest that the specific structure and capabilities of project-based firms provide an explanation for these differences.     

The data scientist profile and its representativeness in the European e-Competence framework and the skills framework for the information age

The activities in our current world are mainly supported by data-driven web applications, making extensive use of databases and data services. Such phenomenon led to the rise of Data Scientists as professionals of major relevance, which extract value from data and create state-of-the-art data artifacts that generate even more increased value. During the last years, the term Data Scientist attracted significant attention. Consequently, it is relevant to understand its origin, knowledge base and skills set, in order to adequately describe its profile and distinguish it from others like Business Analyst. This work proposes a conceptual model for the professional profile of a Data Scientist and evaluates the representativeness of this profile in two commonly recognized competences/skills frameworks in the field of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), namely in the European e-Competence (e-CF) framework and the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). The results indicate that a significant part of the knowledge base and skills set of Data Scientists are related with ICT competences/skills, including programming, machine learning and databases. The Data Scientist professional profile has an adequate representativeness in these two frameworks, but it is mainly seen as a multi-disciplinary profile, combining contributes from different areas, such as computer science, statistics and mathematics.     

Managing knowledge within networked innovation

The purpose of this paper is to research firms’ knowledge management practices within the context of networked innovation between multiple actors. The analysis is based on case research carried out with six companies. Based on earlier literature and the theoretical framework of the paper, two models of networked innovation can be distinguished according to knowledge management needs: networks focusing on the transaction of explicit knowledge and intellectual property, and networks focusing on the co-creation of new knowledge and business opportunities. The paper argues that a strategic approach to knowledge management is a key element of success within networked innovation, both in the theory and in the practices of firms. In that way, firms are able to manage knowledge within networked innovation when they understand their partners’ business models and strategic intents, for example their motivation to collaborate.     

新兴市场企业的技术追赶战略 —— 海外并购和高管海外经历的作用

海外并购一直被产业界作为进入东道国市场、或者获取战略资本的重要手段,尤其是近年来,中国企业越来越多的通过海外并购的方式对发达国家进行反向资本输入,其目的既为了获取海外市场,近年来更多的是为了获取先进的技术。同时,海归人才的回流也反向技术溢出的一个渠道。文章选取了深沪股市中81家上市公司从2005-2014年的海外并购数据作为样本,并收集了这些公司并购的专利申请数目,以及这些企业高管团队的信息建立模型。结果发现,对于新兴市场的企业而言,海外并购可以促进其技术创新绩效的显著提高,而且其拥有海外任职经历的高管团队能够显著促进企业海外并购后更好地将海外先进技术转移和融合,从而提升新兴企业在海外并购后的技术创新能力。     

管理学习的过程模型：基于苏宁的案例研究

管理能力是企业竞争优势的重要来源,现在普遍认为企业通过管理学习能够获取先进的管理技术、推动管理水平的提升,但关于管理学习的具体过程还鲜有研究。本研究以苏宁云商集团为例,通过案例研究揭示了管理学习的动因以及学习过程中的内容选择、路径选择、网络构建三大核心问题。研究表明,①管理升级的困境是管理学习的关键动因;②企业可以通过参观和考察优秀企业、借助外部专业机构辨别学习内容,降低信息不对称性;③企业应该根据管理知识的属性、嵌入性及企业积累的知识基础等特征选择恰当的学习路径;④多元的内外部学习网络能够为企业提供异质的知识来源,从而降低信息不对称性,同时这也是内外部学习代理人的重要来源。     

基才网络视角的企业知识创造与管理

分析了三种类型的网络对于企业的知识创造及管理活动的影响。社会网络理论讨论网络内的知识流动，以及网络联结的强度如何影响知识转化过程；外部网络理论讨论企业的互补知识如何形成，企业之间的学习过程如何实现；内部网络理论则关注不同的结构和管理过程如何帮助及促进知识的创造与转化。     

知识管理的哲学、过程与陷阱

对知识和知识创造与转化过程的管理是现时代赢得竞争优势和企业运作的哲学,但企业在实施知识管理过程中应避免陷入一些似是而非的陷阱。从创新和隐性资产管理的角度比从信息技术的角度研究知识管理能够更好地理解知识管理。知识管理可以促进创新和变化。知识管理系统可以促进知识管理过程和创新过程而促进知识管理。不同的公司有不同的知识管理办法。即使有关公司所面临的问题是相似的,这些不同的公司可能也会采取不同的知识管理实践。     

Professional guilds, tension and knowledge management

Scientific research is a crucial success factor for knowledge intensive firms and is often a joint effort of scientists and managers. However, scientists and managers belong to different “professional guilds,” subscribing to different belief systems and valuing different types of incentives. These differences give rise to tension between scientists and managers. We integrate a large body of literature from knowledge management to develop a new theoretical model predicting that this organizational tension is affected by environmental factors such as the degree of industry munificence, firm-specific factors like knowledge-management policies, and the individual roles of boundary spanners within the firm. Further, we argue that this tension can lead to positive or negative outcomes.     

Knowledge creation for science and technology in academic laboratories: a pilot study

In the last decade, there has been increasing pressure on academic laboratories to produce practical results. The last 10 years also have seen a growing interest in knowledge management, a management discipline believed to enhance organizations’ innovative capability by the sharing and creation of knowledge. While most knowledge management cases refer to the business setting, we believe that the introduction of these practices can also enhance knowledge creation and knowledge sharing within and among research units. This paper focuses on a pilot study being conducted at a Japanese public graduate university – JAIST – under a Center of Excellence (COE) program that was established to bring the performance of research laboratories up to a world class level in productivity by applying the theories and tools of knowledge science. This study is a cooperative effort between the School of Knowledge Science, doing research on knowledge management and systems, and two research laboratories in the School of Materials Science, doing basic and applied research on materials science. The goal of this project is to enhance materials science students’ capabilities so that they become successful creators of new scientific knowledge. A group of seven graduate research students volunteered for the study. As one of the first steps, we introduced a formal and periodic written reporting system that motivates students to think strategically about their experiments, helps them to improve their communications skills, and enables students to self-evaluate their skills and supervisors to evaluate the students’ skills as well as monitor their progress and developments in a formalized way. Since the project is relatively new, these preliminary results are associated with a generalized awareness and participation of the students in the project. However, we are expecting to obtain more concrete results, that is, quantifiable improvements in scientific production, in the near future.     

Knowledge bases and regional innovation systems: Comparing Nordic clusters

The analysis of the importance of different types of regional innovation systems must take place within a context of the actual knowledge base of various industries in the economy, as the innovation processes of firms are strongly shaped by their specific knowledge base. In this paper, we shall distinguish between two types of knowledge base: analytical and synthetic. These types indicate different mixes of tacit and codified knowledge, codification possibilities and limits, qualifications and skills, required organisations and institutions involved, as well as specific competitive challenges from a globalising economy, which have different implications for different sectors of industry, and, thus, for the kind of innovation support needed. The traditional constellation of industrial clusters surrounded by innovation supporting organisations, constituting a regional innovation system, is nearly always to be found in contexts of industries with a synthetic knowledge base (e.g. engineering-based industries), while the existence of regional innovation systems as an integral part of a cluster will normally be the case of industries-based on an analytical knowledge base (e.g. science-based industries, such as IT and bio-tech). In the discussion of different types of regional innovation systems five empirical illustrations from a Nordic comparative project on SMEs and regional innovation systems will be used: the furniture industry in Salling, Denmark; the wireless communication industry in North Jutland, Denmark; the functional food industry in Scania, Sweden; the food industry in Rogaland, Norway and the electronics industry in Horten, Norway. We argue that in terms of innovation policy the regional level often provides a grounded approach embedded in networks of actors acknowledging the importance of the knowledge base of an industry.     

Virtual lead user communities: Drivers of knowledge creation for innovation

This study examines the creation of innovation-related knowledge in virtual communities visited mainly by lead users. Such communities enable firms to access a large number of lead users in a cost-efficient way. A propositional framework relates lead users’ characteristics to unique virtual community features to examine their potential impact on the development of valuable innovation knowledge. The authors empirically validate this framework by analyzing online contributions of lead users for mobile service innovation projects. The findings indicate that the value of their contributions stems from their ability to suggest solutions instead of simply describing problems or stating customer needs. Lead users’ technical expertise also makes them particularly well-suited to develop new functionalities, but less so for design and usability improvements. The digital context favors the creation of explicit knowledge that can be easily integrated into the development of new products. Finally, contributions given by lead users in a proactive way contain more novel insights than reactive contributions such as answers to community members’ questions. The findings should help managers stimulate, identify, and improve the use of lead users’ input in virtual communities.     

A systematic examination of knowledge loss in open source software projects

Context Open Source Software (OSS) development is a knowledge focused activity which relies heavily on contributors who can be volunteers or paid workers and are geographically distributed. While working on OSS projects contributors acquire project related individualistic knowledge and gain experience and skills, which often remains unshared with others and is usually lost once contributors leave a project. All software development organisations face the problem of knowledge loss as employees leave, but this situation is exasperated in OSS projects where most contributors are volunteers with largely unpredictable engagement durations. Contributor turnover is inevitable due to the transient nature of OSS project workforces causing knowledge loss, which threatens the overall sustainability of OSS projects and impacts negatively on software quality and contributor productivity.ObjectiveThe objective of this work is to deeply and systematically investigate the phenomenon of knowledge loss due to contributor turnover in OSS projects as presented in the state-of-the-art literature and to synthesise the information presented on the topic. Furthermore, based on the learning arising from our investigation it is our intention to identify mechanisms to reduce the overall effects of knowledge loss in OSS projects.MethodologyWe use the snowballing methodology to identify the relevant literature on knowledge loss due to contributor turnover in OSS projects. This robust methodology for a literature review includes research question, search strategy, inclusion, exclusion, quality criteria, and data synthesis. The search strategy, and inclusion, exclusions and quality criteria are applied as a part of snowballing procedure.Snowballing is considered an efficient and reliable way to conduct a systematic literature review, providing a robust alternative to mechanically searching individual databases for given topics.ResultKnowledge sharing in OSS projects is abundant but there is no evidence of a formal strategy or practice to manage knowledge. Due to the dynamic and diverse nature of OSS projects, knowledge management is considered a challenging task and there is a need for a proactive mechanism to share knowledge in the OSS community for knowledge to be reused in the future by the OSS project contributors. From the collection of papers found using snowballing, we consolidated various themes on knowledge loss due to contributor turnover in OSS projects and identified 11 impacts due to knowledge loss in OSS projects, and 10 mitigations to manage with knowledge loss in OSS projects.ConclusionIn this paper, we propose future research directions to investigate integration of proactive knowledge retention practices with the existing OSS practices to reduce the current knowledge loss problem. We suggest that there is insufficient attention paid to KM in general in OSS, in particular there would appear to an absence of proactive measures to reduce the potential impact of knowledge loss. We also propose the need for a KM evaluation metric in OSS projects, similar to the ones that evaluate health of online communities, which should help to inform potential consumers of the OSS of the KM status on a project, something that is not existent today.     

知识与创新：创新过程的促进系统路径

本文旨在阐述近期的一些关于经济系统中的知识与其重要性的讨论。这需要借助马歇尔与哈耶克的关于经济中知识的补充性质理论。这一性质一方面有利于对被称为企业资源基础理论的机会与局限进行讨论,从而对知识管理与企业创新行为问的关系予以改进;另一方面有利于坚持为市场动态所引导的、以及存在于市场动态之内的知识的重要性。因而,这两部分的结合使我们得以通过探索更深层次的知识特性、表达改进技术知识管理的需求,以及推广企业创新行为的本土化与辐射化等方法,为认识知识经济的重要性铺平道路。最终,得以推广基于企业创新行为的本土化特点而生成的创新系统路径,并将其用于描述企业关于知识生成、使用、分发与交易的合理应用。