Knowledge management and organizational learning : typologies of knowledge strategies in the Spanich manufacturing industry from 1995 to 1999
- 2002
The purpose of this empirical study is to investigate firm's organizational knowledge strategies in the Spanish manufacturing industry. The study was conducted using a survey questionnaire covering different areas: organizational knowledge management, organizational knowledge management, organizational learning and organizational performance. Following Bierly and Chakrabarty's study, we apply their typology of generic knowledge strategies to the Spanish manufacturing industry. We performed cluster analysis and classified firms in "loners", "exploiters", "explorators", and "innovators". Interesting implications for strategy emerge from the study. First, as stated in the reviewed literature, each firm owns a specific bundle of resources which combined form organizational capabilities. Thus uniqueness nature is the outcome of different organizational decisions. In particular, knowledge strategies determine the stocks and flows of organizational knowledge and thus the competitive advantage of the firm. These decisions involves issues such as the trade-off between knowledge exploitation or exploration, internal or external knowledge, breadth of knowledge base and son on. These decisions should be carefully made in order to configure the best strategy for the firm. As empirical results show, organizatinal performance varies across clusters. So knowledge strategy should be formally integrated among strategic decisions in order to get a good organizational fit