Knowledge Management in Organizations

THE PURPOSE OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE Knowledge is widely recognized as a primary commodity in the current knowledge-based economy. Today, the main asset of production is intellectual capital as opposed to the tangible assets that previously drove manufacturing-based markets (Kemp et al., 2001). In analogy, knowledge is as critical to the information age as oil was to the industrial age. Organizational knowledge, being the multiplicative asset, has been recognized as a key for business success in many sectors of the economy. Extracting the potential value from organizational knowledge is considered a key element in business success (Abar et al., 2004). Knowledge management (KM) is the study of strategy, process, and technology to acquire, select, organize, share, and leverage business-critical information and expertise so as to improve company productivity and decision quality (Satayadas et al., 2001). Knowledge management embodies synergistic integration of information processing capacity and the creative capacity of human beings in order to maximize the responsiveness and flexibility of organizations. A successful organization must be able to manage various types of knowledge and maximize its strategic value (Siau, 2000). Toward this end, there is an indisputable need to enable managers to promote knowledge sharing and to facilitate the acquisition and retention of intellectual capitals (Nah et al., 2002; Nah et al., 2005). As a result, many organizations have begun to re-examine and renovate their business strategies, processes, information technologies, and organizational structures from a knowledge management perspective. This special issue provides a focused outlet for recent advances in knowledge management and seeks to advance our understanding of the organizational and technical issues of knowledge management in organizations. Our purpose is to stimulate more research in this area through the sharing of innovative ideas and new findings among researchers and practitioners.