Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Abstract

We examine the received research on organizational knowledge structures with a special focus on their link to innovation. We note that the literature has used the term knowledge structure to represent three quite distinct components of organizational knowledge: the cognitive templates used by management, the content knowledge of the organization, and the transactive systems used by an organization to organize its knowledge. We use the term organizational knowledge-base as an abstraction to capture the aggregative entity that includes these three components. We then examine the research to identify six primary dimensions along which organizational knowledge-bases differ: size, content, veridicality, degree of differentiation, degree of integration, and embeddedness. We identify the three common mechanisms by which organizations search for innovations, recombinant, cognitive, and experiential search and examine the implications of the knowledge-base dimensions in the context of these mechanisms. This discussion also helps to locate derived dimensions of organizational knowledge-bases such as relatedness, decomposability, and malleability. We then review the organizational antecedents that shape organizational knowledge-bases and conclude with some thoughts on key areas of future research in this literature.

If only HP knew what HP knows—

Lew Platt, HP CEO (in Sieloff, 1999)

A dramatic growth in organizational knowledge over the past few decades has made the problem of ...