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Competition today is forcing companies to increase their effectiveness through exploiting synergy and learning in product innovation. Literature, however, is still mainly focused on how product development projects, seen largely as isolated efforts, should be organised and managed. This article proposes a model to describe and explain how companies can gain a substantive competitive advantage by extending their innovation efforts to other phases of the product life cycle and by facilitating knowledge transfer and learning both within the company and with other partner organisations. The model is based on collaborative research by the authors, based on their involvement in the Euro-Australian co-operation project CIMA (Euro-Australian co-operation centre for Continuous Improvement and innovation MAnagement).

Knowledge management (KM) is relatively new, but still a very hot topic in management research and practice. Leading companies are reshaping their organizations in order to increase their ability in managing knowledge sharing and transfer within and across their organizational boundaries. KM is today considered by many scholars the next arena for global competition. Product innovation (PI), in particular, is one of the most promising areas, where KM is today applied and studied. Management literature has underlined how knowledge becomes the only source of sustainable competitive advantage in turbulent contexts, and the cognitive perspective represents the most adequate approach to analysing and understanding PI as a continuous learning process rather than as a sporadic event. Since the early 1990s, many contributions emerged from different fields, but after nearly one decade, KM is not yet a unitary stream of literature but reflects very diverse roots. In this paper, the different streams and approaches emerging in literature on KM in PI are reviewed and described, aiming at providing researchers with an interpretative tool and some directions for further research.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) still compete on efficiency/flexibility in manufacturing existing relatively stable products. This source of competitive advantage will hardly be viable in the near future for Western Europe SMEs that have to compete with low cost companies from Eastern Europe and developing countries. To survive, they will rather have to improve products and processes, exploiting their intellectual capital in a complex network of knowledge-intensive relations inside and outside their boundaries. The managerial challenge, then, consists of creating new knowledge management (KM) configurations ± in terms of technological and organizational tools ± leading to organizational models sustainable from the competitive point of view. By providing quick and easy access to external sources of knowledge, new information and communication technologies (ICT) can erase traditional constraints on SMEs innovation ability and foster intra/inter-organizational integration. In the area of product innovation (PI) the use of Internet based applications, product data management (PDM)[1], virtual prototyping, computer aided design (CAD), is expected to substantially reshape the overall KM process

Purpose – This study seeks to further the current debate about how to systematically improve hospital performance by enhancing and balancing knowledge exploration and knowledge exploitation\ud capabilities through the development of an electronic medical record (EMR).\ud Design/methodology/approach – The study has an interpretative, inductive perspective, based on multiple and embedded case studies. Three large size Italian hospitals that have introduced an EMR were considered. Evidence was gathered by triangulating multiple sources of evidence.\ud Findings – Three emergent strategies of EMR development are identified. Pros and cons of each strategy are stated and a set of propositions to be tested in further research are formulated. These\ud results provide hospital managers and professionals with clearer guidelines about how to improve performance by implementing a tailored strategy to balance knowledge exploration and knowledge\ud exploitation through the development of an EMR.\ud Originality/value – Most of the literature on EMRs is focused on the benefits, the barriers and the enablers of their adoption. Little is understood about how hospital managers and professionals might\ud leverage on the EMR to ambidextrously combine knowledge exploration and knowledge exploitation, and thus increase hospital performance. The study addresses this gap and offers original insights to advance both theory and practice