Knowledge-based Synergies at the Corporate Level: a Case Study on Knowledge Integration across Organizations

This paper is a case study of ABC, a firm that designs and makes pre-fabricated concrete elements for large public construction projects. ABC pursued corporate knowledge integration because it was formed by acquiring several firms (now BU’s organized geographically) with heterogeneous ways-of-doing, leading to a wide range of performance results across them. For that purpose, ABC designed a set of actions which we find respond to basic characteristics of the knowledge to be integrated. Distinguishing between tacit / explicit (Nonaka, 1994; Grant, 1996), individual / collective types of knowledge (Duncan and Weiss, 1997; Brown and Duguid, 1991; Spender 1994) and firm-specific / general-purpose knowledge (Doeringer and Piore, 1971; Williamson, 1981; Foss and Mahnke, 2001), is useful in conceptualizing knowledge integration practices in corporate environments (Hansen 2002). We show how the knowledge integration trajectory concept (Andreu & Sieber, 2004) can be applied to real world settings such as that of ABC.