Knowledge Management Theory in Interorganizational Settings

This paper presents unexpected findings from a series of workshops conducted with firms involved in interorganizational collaboration (IOC). The scope for the workshops was to identify design criteria for a Knowledge Management System (KMS) for firms involved in IOC. As a starting point, five general Knowledge Management (KM) theoretical assumptions were introduced to IOC practitioners. Surprisingly, the practitioners found most of the assumptions difficult to elaborate on. This unexpected finding is explored and presented in this paper along with supporting evidence and future implications. Throughout this paper we argue that the basis for KM in organizations and in IOC are fundamentally different, and hence the relevance of general KM assumptions found in literature covering the management of knowledge in organizations need to be evaluated against an interorganizational setting. Given this argumentation, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate a number of general KM theoretical assumptions against an IOC setting.