Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Dimensions of Organizational Knowledge-Bases

We now examine the relationship between the concept of an organizational knowledge-base and the three key innovation search processes. Understanding the implications of various knowledge-base dimensions becomes more meaningful, with the prior understanding of the innovation search processes in mind. We follow Walsh’s suggestion that researchers focusing on the knowledge structure construct in relation to management need to address several distinct issues. First, in accordance with his suggestion, we survey the prior research to ‘uncover the attributes’ of knowledge structures that managers use. Second, following Walsh (1995), we need to understand the implications of these knowledge structures for consequences of relevance to managers; specifically we focus on the relationship between these various dimensions of knowledge structures and organizational innovation performance. Finally, in keeping with Walsh’s third precept we try to ‘uncover the origins’ of organizational knowledge structures, i.e. understand the key determinants that shape knowledge structures in any organization. Going forward, unless it is contextually necessary, we use the term organizational knowledge-base everywhere as the term collectively captures all types of knowledge structures.

Research on organizational knowledge-bases has identified several key attributes or dimensions on which knowledge-bases differ. We focus on six such primary dimensions: size, content, ...