Strategies for Managing Organizational Knowledge: Evidences from Spanish Firms

From the resource-based view of the firm to the knowledge-based view of the firm it is clear that a particular intangible resource has become the cornerstone of sustainable competitive advantage (Barney, 1986; Conner, 1991; Foss, 1996; Lippman and Rumelt, 1982; Penrose, 1959). This resource is organizational knowledge. According to Peteraf’s framework (1993) “four conditions must be met for a firm to enjoy sustained above-normal returns. Resource heterogeneity creates Ricardian or monopoly rents. Ex post limits to competition prevent the rents from being competed away. Imperfect factor mobility ensures that valuable factors remain with the firm and that the rents are shared. Ex ante limits to competition keep costs from offsetting the rents” (p. 186). Undoubtedly organizational knowledge qualifes as “the key resource” in today’s competitive environment. Organizational knowledge can adopt two forms: stocks and flows. Organizational learning provides a means to understand how the stocks and flows interact (Crossan and Hulland, 1997). In this sense, Cohen and Levinthal (1990) proposes that knowledge stocks and flows are interrelated because organizations that have a higher knowledge absorptive capacity will also have a higher propensity to utilize and circulate it. Knowledge management is the process by which organizational stocks of knowledge change (Bontis, Crossan and Hulland, 2001). It includes the management of strategic knowledge and its associated processes of creation, organization, diffusion, use and exploitation (Nonaka y Takeuchi, 1995; Skyrme, 2001). With the contributions of the resource-based view of the firm, knowledge-based view of the firm, knowledge management and organizational learning literature, we conduct the following study. The purpose of this study is to analyze knowledge management in the Spanish manufacturing industry. Firstly we analyze to what extent firms are involved in knowledge management: investment in knowledge management, number of knowledge management projects, stage of the knowledge management process and so. Later we identify generic knowledge strategies in the Spanish manufacturing industry. By focusing on the resource-based view of the firm, the knowledge-based view of the firm and the organizational learning literature, and following Bierly and Chakrabarty (1996)’s pioneering study on generic knowledge strategies, we analyze the state-of-theart in Spain. We quantitatively determined the existence of different organizational strategies in the way firms acquire, create, apply, distribute and transfer their knowledge, that is, different organizational knowledge strategies. The empirical results show that knowledge strategies influence organizational performance. So the configuration of these knowledge strategies become a strategic element in the organizational performance puzzle.