From Tacit Knowledge to Knowledge Management: Leveraging Invisible Assets

Within competitive advantage considerations, knowledge has emerged as one of the more strategic, although invisible, assets for organizations. This is notwithstanding a wider and specifically economistic and cognitive discounting of knowledge as a factor of production — largely ignoring the socially constructed and socially mediated nature of knowledge. Intellectual capabilities and knowledge/information transformations now have a central place within globalizing information economies. Constructing, transforming and commodifying knowledge and information require new organizational understandings and newer cognitive capabilities of strategic management praxis. Part of this cognitive awareness is a deliberate organizational designing for the role of symbolic analysts. As well, there is an emerging need for the Chief Knowledge Officer function going well beyond the Chief Information Officer requirements posited by an information technology-driven restructuring of routine processes, as compared with innovation creation capacities associated with critically non-routine functions within organizations discovered by Cranfield research. The paper considers neglected institutional and organizational dimensions to knowledge creation and knowledge conversion — it reviews the renewed importance of internal recruitment and socialization within institutions and details knowledge codification and application functions within knowledge-creating organizations. Knowledge management, as praxis, inevitably raises concerns about cognitive failure in leadership theory and praxis. Copyright # 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.