Measuring Core Competencies in a Clustered Network of Knowledge

Sustainable competitive advantage is often hidden in unique company capabilities, creating knowledge differentials. In particular core competencies have been recognized as strategic knowledge for a company and defined as capabilities providing customer benefits, hard to be imitated from competitors and possessing leverage potential. Nevertheless the process of extracting core competencies results quite complex because of the intangibility of knowledge and its automation calls for competencies formalization. We propose an ontology based approach and a system facilitating knowledge elicitation and automating core competencies extraction process. The system deals also with the automatic clustering of companies in knowledge classes according to the competence tehy hold.