ABSTRACT
In both theory and practice, effective management of knowledge resources is increasingly recognised as critical to an organisation’s ability to derive economic value from its uses of both tangible and intangible resources. Because no one can realistically hope to manage well that which one does not understand in at least fundamental respects, the task of managing knowledge resources begins with the challenge of developing a conceptual framework for identifying and defining the specific knowledge resources that are important in helping a given organisation carry out its ‘strategic intent’ (Hamel 1989a). Given some kind of framework that enables identification of the strategically useful knowledge resources available to an organisation, the next challenge is to develop effective approaches to using existing knowledge in leveraging current organisational competences and to creating and acquiring new knowledge in building new competences (Sanchez and Heene 1996a, 1996b). The challenge of creating more effective management systems for identifying, acquiring or accessing, coordinating and augmenting strategically important knowledge is thus an essential dimension of the ‘contest between managerial cognitions’ that characterises competence-based competition (Sanchez et al. 1996).
