ABSTRACT
To remain viable, organizations must manage their resources strategically. This not only includes managing tangible assets, such as money and property, but also intangible assets, such as knowledge. Moreover, management scholars have identified knowledge as one of the key ingredients to sustain competitive advantage, primarily because companies generate increasingly less return on traditional resources, such as labor, land, and capital (Spender 1996). Despite the pressing need to manage knowledge, many organizations “don’t know what they know” and all organizations “know more than they can tell” (Spender 1996). If organizations do not have processes for learning new knowledge and sharing existing knowledge, they face the possibility of repeating mistakes, “reinventing the wheel,” and wasting valuable time and resources. Organizations must make knowledge available for their employees and support them in developing new knowledge. In this chapter, we focus on outlining a number of strategies that companies can use to do so.
