ABSTRACT
Among the many developments taking place nowadays in the field of management and organization (M&O), the movement emphasizing the role of knowledge is quite striking. From an economic point of view, knowledge is seen as a new production factor, outweighing the traditional ones of land, labour and capital (Drucker 1993; de Geus 1997; Hauschild et al. 2001). It is also argued that knowledge brings forth a world (Krogh et al. 1996). Because of its impact, it is often argued that the development of (organizational) knowledge must not be left to chance, but should be systematically managed. Some companies even appoint special “Chief Knowledge Officers” (CKOs) (Foote et al. 2001) and do many other things in order to raise the “return on knowledge” (RoK). Moreover, there is sometimes also a striking positive difference between the market value and the traditional book value of a company. The idea behind the need for knowledge management and the existence of a return on knowledge is that this value difference becomes understandable when the until now rather “intangible” knowledge factor is brought in. A conceptual change in the way we think about business is supposed to be needed in order to make this factor measurable (Sveiby 2000).
