TABLE OF CONTENTS By the end of this chapter you should be able to:
understand the nature of knowledge in society, its role in creating strategic advantage in knowledge-based enterprises and the role of people management;
understand what knowledge is and its relationship to learning;
describe the processes of knowledge management in organizations and use them to analyse an organization;
understand how organizations create and share knowledge;
understand the relationship between knowledge and learning, especially the importance of tacit knowledge;
apply a knowledge management perspective to an organization;
understand the notion of intellectual capital, and advise on how it might be measured in different types of organization;
use measures of intellectual capital to evaluate an organization;
understand how different forms of knowledge relate to organizations and processes and the issue of managing people;
advise managers on the nature of 'knowledge workers' and the issues connected with managing knowledge workers;
advise on an appropriate performance management system for knowledge workers.
One of the received wisdoms in the strategic management literature is that organizations that are able to integrate disparate sources of knowledge across their boundaries will be those that survive and prosper. These disparate sources include not only formal, written or coded forms of knowledge but also the possession of some advantageous, intangible, knowledge-based assets (Sparrow et al., 2004). Indeed, as we have seen in Chapter 4, some writers on innovation go further to claim...
