ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the 'fundamental theory of the firm' to present three distinct knowledge management strategies: a knowledge hierarchy, a knowledge market, and a knowledge community. All three strategies deliver knowledge by blending people-to-document and people-to-people approaches, depending on the nature of the knowledge. Today, knowledge is widly recognised as lying at the heart of organizational performance. In a 1999 article in the Harvard Business Review, Hansen, Nohria, and Tierney presented two now-common ways to view knowledge and knowledge management: people-to-documents and people-to-people. In the people-to-documents approach, referred to as 'codification', knowledge is formally identified, codified, and stored in a Knowledge Management System (KMS). Pharmaco is a multinational pharmaceutical firm with research and manufacturing facilities in five continents and sales operations in six continents. Pharmaco has a variety of knowledge needs, two of which are research knowledge and sales knowledge. Pharmaco's CEO recognized that sharing research knowledge is critical to Pharmaco's long-term success.
