ABSTRACT
Today knowledge is playing an important role in organizations. Companies find it increasingly difficult to achieve and sustain competitive advantages through the reallocation of capital alone (Bresman et al. 1999). The speed and complexity of decision-making and technology have increased and have led to numerous challenges such as reshaped industries, radical diversification, alliances and increasing competition from smaller companies (Leipold et al. 2002). Pressure on corporations to adapt to new markets as fast as possible is steadily increasing. There is less and less time to react to competitors. This, as well as globalization, shorter product life cycles and demanding customers, do not allow companies to focus merely on their main resources such as land, labour and capital anymore. These factors do not disappear, but become second-ranked in the modern economy. The most import asset of a corporation today are its intellectual assets; its knowledge (Drucker 1992). Spender (1996) puts it like this: the origin of all tangible resources lies outside
the firm. It follows that competitive advantage is more likely to arise from the intangible firm-specific knowledge which enables it to add value to the incoming factors of production in a relatively unique manner (Spender 1996). Knowledgebased approaches in management research therefore consider organizations primarily to be vehicles producing, transferring and combining knowledge (Kogut and Zander 1996; Nonaka 1994) and basically see firms as social communities that serve as efficient mechanisms for the creation and transformation of knowledge into economically rewarded products and services (Kogut and Zander 1993).
