This research was initiated in the belief that new product development requires the integration of diverse knowledge located in different units or organizations. In recent decades, evolutionary scholars have emphasized the importance of coherent systems and regional scientists have highlighted...

Enterprises in both the public and private sector undertake knowledge management (KM) initiatives through which they hope to engender a new, more adaptive and flexible culture of learning and innovation in their organisations. Creative activities involving social learning and innovation are,...

n the late 1990s, Knowledge Management (KM) and Communities of Practice (CoPs) seemed inseparable. CoPs appeared to offer the key to reversing the failure of some of the earlier technologically based attempts to manage knowledge. However, the original CoP concept was built around a very...

This paper explores the contribution of communal structures such as Communities of Practice (CoPs) on intraorganizational Knowledge Management (KM). First, we look at intraorganizational knowledge management and explore the role that information systems can play. We introduce the idea of...

As commercial organisations face up to modern pressures to downsize and outsource they have begun to realise that they have lost knowledge as people leave and take with them what they know. This knowledge is increasingly being recognised as an important resource and organisations are now taking...

Within the Knowledge Management context, there is growing interest in computer support for group knowledge sharing and the role that Communities of Practice play in this. Communities of Practice are groups of individuals with a common purpose and who share some background, language or...

Previous research on corporate household and corporate householding has presented examples, literature review, and working definitions. In this paper, we first improve our understanding of the area by developing a typology of corporate householding tasks and knowledge requirements. We stress the...

This paper examines how existing patterns in knowledge sharing within a business organization can be managed to promote knowledge sharing. The existing patterns are analyzed in a Dutch consulting company using the four elementary forms of sociality (communal sharing, authority ranking, equality...

This paper explores Knowledge Management (KM) practices for use with portal technologies in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The aim is to help NGOs become true Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). In order to deal with more donors (at the top) and more beneficiaries (at the bottom), NGOs...

The formation of communities of practice in business represents, possibly, the best way to manage knowledge bases in organizations since they integrate the most important dimensions in knowledge management: the technological dimension, the strategic dimension and the cultural or behavioral...