A strategic management framework for leveraging knowledge assets

Abstract

The management of organisational knowledge can be a key lever for improving performance, boosting productivity and creativity and facilitating innovation in corporate settings. The commonly used approaches for managing knowledge follow one of two perspectives: the process-centric (a primarily people-based approach that treats knowledge management as a social communication process) and a product-centric approach (mostly content-based and focuses on knowledge-related artefacts). This paper presents a strategic management framework that is knowledge asset-based and attempts to fuse these two approaches in a balanced manner. The framework builds upon and extends the resource-based view of the firm by explicitly treating knowledge assets as the main driver for innovation and learning, and by consistently examining the links of knowledge assets with all the main components of a strategic approach.