Learning from alliances: Knowledge management or ""ignorance management'?
The past two decades have seen the emergence of a variety of strategic alliances in an attempt by organizationsto cope with the demands of rapidly changing and complex environments. Initially, reasons for strategic alliances havebeen primarily economic or strategic ? risk sharing, market penetration, technology transfer or pooling resources. As theknowledge-based theory of the firm gained prominence, organizations have started realizing that knowledge is a criticalresource for competitive advantage. Organizations have recently started paying more attention to processes that can enableinter-organizational learning and knowledge transfer. Research conducted so far regarding knowledge transfer betweenpartners in strategic alliances clearly indicates that the transfer does not happen automatically and has to be managed. Italso shows that managers may not be fully aware of how to facilitate knowledge transfer. The barriers to knowledgetransfer are a complex mixture of issues covering organizational, social and technological factors as well as the nature ofknowledge being shared. A review of the literature indicates that organizations do not seem to utilise tools created in theknowledge management field that can facilitate knowledge sharing. There is also a feeling among scholars that while organizationscan develop strategies to exploit what they know, it is never possible to know everything that an organization needsand organizations should also learn how to manage their ?ignorance? as well. This paper identifies some questions forknowledge management scholars and practitioners to carry out research in knowledge transfer and inter-organizationallearning among strategic alliances.
Year of publication: |
2005
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Authors: | Sankaran Sivarama ; Kouzmin Alexander ; Hase Stewart |
Publisher: |
Common Ground Publishing |
Saved in:
freely available
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