Examining Knowledge Spillover And Knowledge Creation Patterns In Organizations: A Theoretical Framework

21st century has been recognized as the knowledge-based economic era. The most distinctive feature of the knowledge-based economy is that knowledge has become the strategically significant resource organizations possess to sustain competitive advantage. Organizations must survive and succeed in the midst of dramatic and rapid environmental changes. Since organizational inputs and outputs are associated with various kinds of knowledgeable resources, obtaining, organizing, and applying knowledge become the main parts of organizations' activities. Theories and tools are needed to manage and create sources of valuable knowledge and to develop organizational knowledge bases to create organizations' innovativeness and sustain the competitive advantage Wave after wave of new technologies have made our interactions with colleagues and partners more seamless than ever before, from email systems and collaborative workspaces, to today’s web 2.0 tools and state-of-the-art telepresence suites for remote conferencing. But in the flurry of excitement (and hype) that surrounds such developments, it's easy to forget that knowledge integration is, after all, an essentially human practice. If you get the fundamentals wrong, no technology in the world is going to assist people to interact seamlessly. Knowledge transfer and creation serve as the vehicle to organizations' ability to innovate and tighter cooperation. This transfer and creation of knowledge which can also be referred as knowledge integration leads to accumulation of organizational knowledge and learning and both of these factors are influential to organizations' adaptation to the environmental changes Therefore, organizations that prove to have superior capabilities to manage knowledge will be more capable of adapting to environmental changes with high uncertainty and complexity. The paper tries to address to this integral issue of knowledge integration with business strategy by examining the existing theoretical framework and to support the thought few industry cases have been mentioned.

1.    Introduction: 21st century has been recognized as the knowledge-based economic era. The most distinctive feature of the knowledge-based economy is that knowledge has become the strategically significant resource organizations possess to sustain competitive advantage. Organizations must survive and succeed in the midst of dramatic and rapid environmental changes. Since organizational inputs and outputs are associated with various kinds of knowledgeable resources, obtaining, organizing, and applying knowledge become the main parts of organizations' activities. Theories and tools are needed to manage and create sources of valuable knowledge and to develop organizational knowledge bases to create organizations' innovativeness and sustain the competitive advantage

Wave after wave of new technologies have made our interactions with colleagues and partners more seamless than ever before, from email systems and collaborative workspaces, to today’s web 2.0 tools and state-of-the-art telepresence suites for remote conferencing. But in the flurry of excitement (and hype) that surrounds such developments, it's easy to forget that knowledge integration is, after all, an essentially human practice. If you get the fundamentals wrong, no technology in the world is going to assist people to interact seamlessly.
Knowledge transfer and creation serve as the vehicle to organizations' ability to innovate and tighter cooperation. This transfer and creation of knowledge which can also be referred as knowledge integration leads to accumulation of organizational knowledge and learning and both of these factors are influential to organizations' adaptation to the environmental changes Therefore, organizations that prove to have superior capabilities to manage knowledge will be more capable of adapting to environmental changes with high uncertainty and complexity. The paper tries to address to this integral issue of knowledge integration with business strategy by examining the existing theoretical framework and to support the thought few industry cases have been mentioned.

2.    Strategy: A strategy to an organization is, amongst other things, a plan of how the organization can achieve its goals and objectives (Davies 2000) it is a ‘commitment of present resources to future expectations’ (Drucker 1999). The aim of strategy is to decide on organizational goals, the means of achieving those goals, and ensuring that the organization is sustainably positioned in order to pursue these goals. Furthermore, the strategies developed provide a base for managerial decision making.
Within the bounds of this framework, the independent variables of external and internal environmental analysis will generate a number of candidate strategies. From these candidate strategies, the selected strategies will determine the products and services provided, in effect, the organization’s position and scope. The products and services to be produced, in turn determine the resources, which include knowledge assets, required to produce them (Teece, Pisano &
Shuen 1997).
Thus strategy can be seen as the balancing act performed by the firm as it straddles the high wire strung between the external environment (opportunities and threats) and the internal capabilities of the firm (strengths and weaknesses). So in order to take a charge of the entire organization’s performance, all the variables either external environmental variables or internal variables must be taken into consideration. The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) framework is perhaps the most well-known approach to defining strategy, having influenced both practice and research for over many years. Performing a SWOT analysis involves describing and analyzing a firm’s internal capabilities – its strengths and weaknesses – relative to the opportunities and threats of its competitive environment. Organizations are advised to take strategic actions to preserve or sustain strengths, offset weaknesses, avert or mitigate threats, and capitalize on opportunities.
Application of the SWOT framework has been dominated over the last few years by Porter’s "five-force" model. This model focuses on the external side of strategy, helping firms to analyze the forces in an industry which give rise to opportunities and threats. Industries structured so as to enable firms to dictate terms to suppliers and customers, and to provide barriers to new entrants and substitute products are seen as favorable. Strategy becomes a matter of choosing an appropriate industry and positioning the firm within that industry according to a generic strategy of either low cost or product differentiation.
While enjoying much popularity, in no small part because it was perhaps the first attempt to apply solid economic thinking to strategic management in a practical and understandable way, Porter's model has come under criticism (D. J. Teece 1991). The main argument is that the model addresses the profitability of industries rather than individual firms, and therefore does not help particular firms to identify and leverage unique and therefore sustainable advantages. Its underlying economic theory assumes that the characteristics of particular firms, per se, do not matter with regard to profit performance (K. R. Connor 1991) . Rather it is the overall pattern of relationships among firms in the industry that makes the difference. If the industry as a whole is structured properly (i.e., with sufficient barriers and other impediments to competition), then all firms should realize excess returns.
It turns out, however, that unique characteristics of particular firms within an industry can make a difference in terms of profit performance (M. E. Porter, 1997). To put balance back into the original notion of business strategy, recent work in the area of strategic management and economic theory has begun to focus on the internal side of the equation – the firm’s resources and capabilities. This new perspective is referred to as the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (J. B. Barney 1996). Strategic management models traditionally have defined the firm’s strategy in terms of its product/market positioning – the products it makes and the markets it serves. The resource-based approach suggests, however, that firms should position themselves strategically based on their unique, valuable and inimitable resources and capabilities rather than the products and services derived from those capabilities. Resources and capabilities can be thought of as a platform from which the firm derives various products for various markets. Leveraging resources and capabilities across many markets and products, rather than targeting specific products for specific markets, becomes the strategic driver. While products and markets may come and go, resources and capabilities are more enduring. Therefore, a resource-based strategy provides a more long-term view than the traditional approach, and is more robust in uncertain and dynamic competitive environments. Competitive advantage based on resources and capabilities therefore is potentially more sustainable than that based solely on product and market positioning.

Porter focused on the analysis of the industry and market that a firm operates in: a predominantly outward looking view, the main thrust of which was the examination of competitive forces, and opportunities and threats present in the external environment (Barney 1991). The resource based view however, focuses on firm specific resources.
The resources referred to in RBV include assets, capabilities, organizational processes, attributes, information and knowledge (Barney 1991, p. 101).

Resources of a firm include physical, human, and organizational capital, a mixture of tangible and intangible assets, skills or competence. Productivity comes from the application and coordination of resources. Hence, productivity comes from capability. While resources are the source of a firm’s capabilities, capabilities are the main source of competitive advantage.

3.    The Two ‘Schools’ Within RBV: Within the RBV ‘school’, two perspectives exist. First is the conservative approach which suggests that firms focus on what they are good at, and that they already possess the requisite competences.  Second is concerned with the dynamic capabilities required to support strategies (Teece, Pisano & Shuen 1997). The conservative approach suggests that competences determine strategies, whereas the dynamic approach suggests that strategies determine competences (Grant 1991). A ‘dynamic’ perspective will see diversification as an opportunity to generate or acquire new competences. This may be done through recruitment, training, mergers and acquisitions, or horizontal or vertical integration.
Due to changes in technology, politics, economics and business models, most markets today are dynamic. To survive, organizations need the capacity to match, anticipate or even create market change. The dynamic market demands a dynamic response, requiring organizations to adapt through the development of new knowledge to generate new skills and capabilities, ensuring that the firm’s resources base will suit future requirements. Firms, like other social entities, evolve through the adaptation of their organizational knowledge, which is comprised of the collective knowledge of its people and the firm’s capabilities.

4.    The Knowledge Based View of the Firm: In the past decade, the RBV movement has spawned something similar called the Knowledge Based View of the firm (KBV) (Gehani 2002). The basis of the knowledge-based view is that competitive advantage comes from intangible assets such as firm-specific knowledge, the tacit knowledge of its people, and the ability to create knowledge (Gehani 2002). KBV holds knowledge assets, resources and capabilities as the prime strategic resources. The discussion on firm resources so far has included examples of: resources such as skills and know-how; and capabilities including methodologies, routines, activities, ability to innovate and ability to learn. These are all examples of knowledge and the cognitive processes required to deploy knowledge. In these cases, resources are personal knowledge possessed by the firm’s people, while capabilities are organizational knowledge, possessed by the firm.

5.    Knowledge management (KM) As we have discussed, all organizations have a number of resources, some of which can be converted into capabilities such as know-how or tacit knowledge. Knowledge management’s purpose, simply put, is the creation, collection and conversion of individual knowledge into organizational knowledge. Knowledge management’s strength lies in its ability to harness knowledge resident in an organization, for the benefit of itself, its customers and shareholders.It comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice. KM efforts typically focus on organizational objectives such as improved performance, competitive advantage, innovation, the sharing of lessons learned, integration and continuous improvement of the organization. KM efforts overlap with organizational learning, and may be distinguished from that by a greater focus on the management of knowledge as a strategic asset and a focus on encouraging the sharing of knowledge. KM efforts can help individuals and groups to share valuable organizational insights, to reduce redundant work, to avoid reinventing the wheel per se, to reduce training time for new employees, to retain intellectual capital as employees turnover in an organization, and to adapt to changing environments and markets (McAdam & McCreedy 2000) (Thompson & Walsham 2004).As the study on Knowledge Management matures, academic debates have increased regarding both the theory and practice of KM. In general the study of KM can be categorized into three perspectives:
•    Techno-centric with a focus on technology, ideally those that enhance knowledge sharing and creation.
•    Organizational with a focus on how an organization can be designed to facilitate knowledge processes best.
•    Ecological with a focus on the interaction of people, identity, knowledge, and environmental factors as a complex adaptive system akin to a natural ecosystem
KM can also be viewed in terms of-People – how do you increase the ability of an individual in the organization to influence others with their knowledge. Processes – Its approach varies from organization to organization. There is no limit on the number of processes. Technology – It needs to be chosen only after all the requirements of a knowledge management initiative have been established.
In today's information-driven economy, companies uncover the most opportunities — and ultimately derive the most value — from intellectual rather than physical assets. To get the most value from a company's intellectual assets, KM practitioners maintain that knowledge must be shared and serve as the foundation for collaboration. Yet better collaboration is not an end in itself; without an overarching business context, KM is meaningless at best and harmful at worst. Consequently, an effective KM program should help a company do one or more of the following:
•    Foster innovation by encouraging the free flow of ideas
•    Improve decision making
•    Improve customer service by streamlining response time
•    Boost revenues by getting products and services to market faster
•    Enhance employee retention rates by recognizing the value of employees' knowledge and rewarding them for it
•    Streamline operations and reduce costs by eliminating redundant or unnecessary processes
 A creative approach to KM can result in improved efficiency, higher productivity and increased revenues in practically any business function. But for all these benefits it is very much important to integrate the organizational strategic framework with the knowledge strategies the next part of the paper focuses on describing the business strategies.
6.    The Knowledge Strategy: A knowledge strategy defines the actions necessary to ensure the organization’s knowledge assets meet organizational objectives and support its strategies. In line with competitive strategies, knowledge strategies provide goals, a unified vision, and a base for decision-making, a communication tool, and a foundation for consistent operations
It is a paralleling the traditional SWOT analysis, describes the overall approach an organization intends to take to align its knowledge resources and capabilities to the intellectual requirements of its strategy. It can be described along two dimensions reflecting its degree of aggressiveness. The first addresses the degree to which an organization needs to increase its knowledge in a particular area vs. the opportunity it may have to leverage existing but underexploited knowledge resources, that is, the extent to which the firm is primarily a creator vs. user of knowledge. This means that a knowledge strategy is not solely about identifying the technical capabilities required by the firm’s strategic plans, but should also ensure that capabilities are able to deliver productive output .The second dimension addresses whether the primary sources of knowledge are internal or external. Together these characteristics help a firm to describe and evaluate its current and desired knowledge strategy (March.1991)

7.     Aligning HRM Practices and Knowledge Strategies: A firm can enhance its knowledge base, and thereby positively affect firm performance, when human resource management practices are congruent with the firm's knowledge strategy. The knowledge base of the firm will positively affect overall organizational effectiveness through the creation of sustainable competitive advantages. Internal and external factors can also moderate this process. Firm characteristics, such as firm size, structure and culture, will influence the choice of HRM practices and will determine how a specific knowledge strategy changes the firm's knowledge base. Certain industry characteristics, such as the market structure and the strength of its existing regime of appropriability, will determine how the evolution of a firm's knowledge base will lead to superior performance. The set of strategic choices addressing knowledge creation in an organization comprise the firm's knowledge strategy, which provides the firm with guidelines for developing intellectual capital and therefore creating competitive advantage. For each type of knowledge strategy there should be internal consistency between strategic actions and other organizational practices and systems. A knowledge strategy can be viewed as a firm's set of strategic choices regarding two knowledge domains:
a) The creation or acquisition of new knowledge- These are those activities that are concerned with increasing the stock of knowledge -- what March (1991) refers to as "exploration," and Spender (1992) calls "knowledge generation" --
b) The ability to leverage existing knowledge to create new organizational products and processes-they are those activities concerned with deploying knowledge in order to produce goods and services – what March (1991) refers to as “exploitation,” and Spender (1992) calls “knowledge application”.
Reconciling the dichotomy between knowledge creating and knowledge applying activities represents a key challenge for economic organization: knowledge creation requires specialization, while knowledge application requires diversity of knowledge. Given the limited transferability of knowledge, this presents considerable difficulty for the institutions of production. The solution lies in some process of knowledge integration that permits individuals to apply their specialized knowledge to the production of goods and services, while preserving the efficiencies of specialization in knowledge acquisition.
8.     Knowledge Management on Practitioner’s Front: Most of the big giants have now realized the significance of knowledge management and this leads them to spend a lot on knowledge creation. The Japanese organizations are unmatchable in their ways to think about knowledge and its role in business organizations. Managers at some highly successful Japanese companies such as Honda, Canon, NEC, and Sharp recognize that creating new knowledge is not simply a matter of mechanistically processing objective information. Rather, it depends on tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions, and ideals of employees. The tools for making use of such knowledge are often “soft”—such as slogans, metaphors, and symbols—but they are indispensable for continuous innovation. Though the practice of managing the knowledge workforce has taken deep roots in many Indian companies too few of them have been mentioned below:


9.    Technology and Knowledge Management at Tata Consultancy Services.
TCS’S knowledge Management (KM) service practice offers solution expertise across several products to cater to the KM needs of pharmaceutical telecom, insurance, manufacturing, consulting, banking and financial services, and government organization. Competencies of TCS

•    TCS has expertise in delivering KM solutions using leading KM products like Documentum, File Net, Lotus Domino/ Domino/Domino.Doc, Hummingbird, Live link and IBM Content Manger.
•    The functional and technical consultants, supported by the TCS KM practice, endeavor to provide best-of –breed solutions to customers. This involves developing stand –alone KM systems as Well as providing integrated systems, for example, KM integration with SAP and CRM.
•    The TCS Documentum and Lotus Centers of Excellence (COEs) consolidate the best practices and lessons learned in multiple projects into well- developed and mature methodologies for solution delivery.
•    Their alliances with Documentum and IBM further strengthen their expertise and solution offerings in this space.
•    TCS helps its customer in formulating their KM vision and strategy and in developing a project charter for implementation. This can begin with the assessment of the customer organization’s readiness to embark on a KM initiative.
•    KM aims to bring people, processes and technology together in a collaborative environment. TCS studies the ‘as-is’ environment in an organization in terms of the awareness and buy-in of employees to move towards a sharing and collaboration culture , participation in the evolution of processes, and acceptance of new systems. This helps in achieving the ‘to-be’ vision.
•    TCS can help identify the pain areas through analyses of business problems, knowledge assets and IT infrastructure, and then suitably suggest the KM implementation roadmap that suit customer. This includes explaining KM policies and processes, defining their boundaries and milestones (through a ‘scoping ‘exercise), assisting the selection of best-fit technologies, and the laying down of a deployment plan.
•    TCS carry out training and awareness sessions in customer organization regarding KM, and audit the overall progress of the initiative.
•    Based on the experience of implementing KM solutions using variety of products, TCS can help in defining evaluation criteria – cost, vendor support, functionality fit, ease of customization, deployment time, industry vertical product offering, leveraging existing infrastructure and ease of integration for products- to match a specific business need as well as evaluate products against the defined criteria.

10.    Pillars of Knowledge Management at Infosys Pvt. Ltd.: Infosys Technologies has won the prestigious ‘Global Most –admired Knowledge Enterprises’ (MAKE)’ award, for 2004. Infosys is involved in effectively transforming enterprise knowledge into wealth- creating ideas, products and solutions. They are building portfolios of intellectual capital and intangible assets which will enable them to out- perform their competitors in the future.
At Infosys, knowledge management (Km) is central to a core strategy to provide differentiated value to customers and enable their business to do better and become more competitive. Knowledge in its different manifestations continues to be critical to provide superior value base on commitment to innovation and excellence in execution. Through the development of a culture of beneficent knowledge exchange across the enterprise, Infosys has been able to create a sustained environment for continuous learning and collaboration among people across geographies and functions. This in turn facilitates optimal value delivery of knowledge infused services and products to customers.
Knowledge repositories Knowledge shop (K –Shop); Process Asset Database (PAD) and People Knowledge Map (PKM)
11.    Knowledge Shop: Infosys built the K-shop architecture Microsoft site serve technology, and all employees can access it through a web interface. The company encourages people to submit papers related to technology, domain, trends, culture, project experiences, internal or external literature, etc. they can submit the articles in any format that the web supports, and designed templates for various content types to ensure uniformity. In addition, the K-shop documents are available to all Infosys employees’ and are segregated based on the users selected keywords and content type.
12.    Process Assets Database: Process assets database is a database which captures the “as is” projects deliverable. This database contains the employee’s experiences on projects, projects artifacts such the documents, based on domain, technology, project type, project code, customer name, and so on. This helps provide new projects with information on similar, previously executed projects and helps set quantitative goals.
13.    Process Knowledge Map: The process Knowledge Map is a directory of experts in various field. It is an Internet-based system where employees can search and locate experts. It serves as the bridge between knowledge workers, the user and the provider.
Infosys Intranet portal SPARSH serves as the window for all systems and acts as the central tool. The company’s Quality System Documentation is a repository of all process- related guidelines, checklists and templates. These serve to standardize the projects outputs. Infosys also has electronic bulletin boards for discussing technical and domain – related topics. In addition, there are new groups and newsletters brought out by various departments that discuss technology and business trends.
Incentive for knowledge sharing is another feature of KM Infosys .when an Infosyian submits a document to the K-shop; experts review the document in detail. If found acceptable, the K-shop publishes it. The reviewer and author are rewarded with Knowledge Currency Units (KCU) when an employee reads or uses a document from the K –shop, he or she is encouraged to give KCU, for that document based on the benefits gained from reading it. Authors can accumulate KCUs serve two objectives, they act as a mechanism both for rewarding knowledge sharing and rating the quality of assets in the repository.
Recognizing and Rewarding Innovation and KM  is done through Funding for presentation at conferences, publications on Web sites,” ideas beget wealth” – the Syslabs awards for technical innovation ,best practice sharing KCU-the Knowledge Currency Unit, Innovation is a criterion for the Infosys Excellence Award , “ Innovation management’- a key result area in the Infosys  KMM(knowledge management maturity) model.
Knowledge Management has helped Infosys increase its productivity and reduce defect levels .A rough estimate shows that Infosys reduced its defects level by much as 40%thus significantly reducing the associated reward and the cost of detaching and preventing defects. Also effective reuse has increased productivity by3% All of this has been possible due to faster access to accurate information and reuse of knowledge.
14.     Getting the best from Knowledge Workers: at Hewlett-Packard
Knowledge management is exploding at Hewlett-Packard .While there has been no top- down mandate to manage knowledge at this highly decentralized computer and electronics firm, many divisions and departments are “knowledge czar” would not fit with HP’s culture, but many managers are attempting to capture and distribute the knowledge resident in their own business units and departments. The most focused, intensive approach to knowledge management is in the Product Processes Organization (PPO), which provides such services to HP product divisions as purchasing, engineering, market intelligence, change management, and environmental and safety consulting. The organization has adopted many approaches to knowledge transfer in the past, including catalogs of documents, video and audiotapes of meetings, best practice database ,and the Work Innovation Network, a series of meetings and ongoing discussions on change management topics. However, until recently there had been no formal responsibility for knowledge management in PPO.

The knowledge management group was framed internally within PPOs initial charter was to capture and leverage product generation-oriented knowledge for managers of the product generation process in the various HP product divisions. The group quickly developed prototype of a Web- based knowledge management system called Knowledge Links. Its primary content is knowledge about the product generation process; the knowledge may come from a variety of different functional perspectives, including marketing, R&D, engineering, and manufacturing. The knowledge going into Knowledge Links comes from outside the Knowledge Management group, but group members add value by identifying, editing, and formatting the knowledge, and making it easy to access and use.The corporate ISST had previously sponsored similar workshop initiatives in the areas of reengineering and organizational change management. key objectives for the workshops included the facilitation of knowledge sharing through informal networking, and the establishment of knowledge sharing through informal networking, and the establishment of common language and management frameworks for knowledge management .
15.     Building a Network of Experts: Another knowledge project was initiated by the library function within HP Laboratories, the company‘s research arm. The goal of this project is provide a guide to human knowledge resources within the Labs and, eventually, to other parts of Hewlett- Packard.
16.    Managing Knowledge for the Computer Dealer Channel: Technical support for the dealer channel had previously involved answering phone calls; the business unit was growing at 40% annually, and calls from dealers ware growing at the same rate. Eventually, answering all the phone calls would require all the people in Northern California. HP workers began to put frequently- asked questions on a dial –up database, and the number of dealer support calls began to decline. The system came to be called HP Network News. It was converted to Lotus Notes and has been remarkably successful in reducing the number of calls. One key reason for the system’s effectiveness is the developers’ close attention to the actual problems faced by dealers, not their own ideas about what knowledge is important. Another important factor is the constant effort by developers to add value to the knowledge.
Aggressive firms take a Schumpeterian view of knowledge as an ongoing process of creative destruction. But rather than wait for a competitor to destroy the value of their knowledge, these firms aggressively seek to obsolete their own knowledge, always staying one step ahead of the competition. Aggressive firms, like conservative ones, develop tacit knowledge that they explicate to exploit. However, they are less concerned with erecting barriers to the diffusion or transfer of that knowledge out of the firm. Rather than erect barriers, they protect their knowledge resources by recruiting and developing intelligent, loyal and committed employees and support them with a culture of learning, commitment and collaboration. While the leaner, more abstract explicit knowledge may diffuse out of the firm, the richer tacit knowledge providing the firm its sustainable knowledge-advantage still remains within the firm. That tacit knowledge is what enables the firm to learn faster and to develop more creative and valuable insights than its competitors, as described earlier. The firm’s advantage comes from being able to absorb external knowledge and integrate it with their internal knowledge to develop new insights faster than the competition.
17.     Conclusion: This study has explored the areas of strategic management, the resource and knowledge based views of the firm, and knowledge management. It also covered few examples from big corporate houses that are successful and profitable because of knowledge strategies adopted by them.  The conclusion reached is that resources are essential for organizations to deliver the products and services that justify their existence. These products and services are determined by the organization’s strategies. In order for resources, such as skills and know-how, to be effective, they are transformed into organizational capabilities through routines and activities. For a firm to endure, capabilities need to be more durable than the resources upon which they are based. Organizational capabilities are required to continue, even though individual resources are replaced periodically (Grant 1991). Knowledge management’s role is to preserve organizational capabilities, ensuring they are durable, despite the inevitable fact that the firm’s human resources move on.
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16.    Website of TCS & Company reading material
17.    Website of Infosys Pvt. Ltd. & Company reading material
18.    Website of HP & Company reading material