Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Future Directions

In view of the size, complexity and diversity of the field it is hard enough to come up with an encapsulation of the current state of OLKM, and even more difficult to be definitive about future directions. However, undaunted by the task, we offer here some speculation about future directions. These are based on three main sources: an informal review of current citation patterns for recently-published papers; an overview of the predictions from authors who have contributed to this Handbook; and the results of our own discussions as we have developed the Handbook.

Our review of recent papers used ISI citation data for papers published since 2006. In this relatively short period of time, a few papers have already received over a hundred citations, and many have received over thirty. We can identify four main clusters of papers, around which recent energy has been focused, and hence which may be indicative of future trends. The strongest interest is around the drivers of corporate performance and competitive advantage. Two very influential papers (Teece, 2007; Simon, Hitt, and Ireland, 2007) examine the inner mechanisms whereby dynamic capabilities can sustain corporate performance, and Rai, Patnakayuni, and Seth (2006) and Hult et al. (2006) both look at the way knowledge can be managed in supply chains to drive competitive advantage. Other examples of well-cited papers in this area include Krishnan et al. (2006) on trust and alliance performance, and Zellmer-Bruhn ...