The Process of Knowledge Transfer: A Diachronic Analysis of Stickiness

TLDR

Knowledge transfer within firms is often assumed to be costless and instantaneous, yet in practice it is laborious and time‑consuming. The study proposes a process model of knowledge transfer that treats it as a multi‑stage process rather than a single act, thereby incorporating the difficulty of transfer. The model delineates initiation and implementation stages, links opportunity‑related factors to initiation difficulty and execution‑related factors to implementation difficulty, and introduces stage‑specific stickiness measures to assess predictive power. A cross‑sectional survey of 122 organizational practice transfers across eight firms demonstrates the model’s applicability and highlights several avenues for future research.

Abstract

Even though intrafirm transfers of knowledge are often laborious, time consuming, and difficult, current conceptions treat them as essentially costless and instantaneous. When acknowledged, difficulty is an anomaly in the way transfers are modeled rather than a characteristic feature of the transfer itself. One first step toward incorporating difficulty in the analysis of knowledge transfer is to recognize that a transfer is not an act, as typically modeled, but a process. This article offers a process model of knowledge transfer. The model identifies stages of transfer and factors that are expected to correlate with difficulty at different stages of the transfer. The general expectation is that factors that affect the opportunity to transfer are more likely to predict difficulty during the initiation phase, whereas factors that affect the execution of the transfer are more likely to predict difficulty during subsequent implementation phases. Measures of stickiness are developed for each stage of the transfer to explore the predictive power of different factors at different stages of the process. A cross-sectional analysis of primary data collected through a two-step survey of 122 transfers of organizational practices within eight firms illustrates the applicability of the model and suggests several issues for further research.