Knowledge Intermediation: New Business Models in the Digital Economy

The upsurge of Internet and e-commerce strengthens the idea that knowledge is the key resource for competitive advantage, because such technologies offer opportunities to acquire and share knowledge with no geographical or temporal limits. Nevertheless, the experience shows that the practical implementation of new business strategies, grounded on the deliberate exploitation of knowledge though the Internet, is a complex issue that requires new managerial tools and roles. This paper examines and discusses emerging business roles that can be referred to as “knowledge intermediaries” online, whose aim is to provide services for retrieving, acquiring, and managing external knowledge resources. After characterising the conceptual features of such business model, based on the analysis of the literature on Knowledge Management and e-commerce, the findings of preliminary case-study research are discussed.