Knowledge Integration in Large-Scale Organizations and Networks – Conceptual Overview and Operational Definition

Abstract

Knowledge integration is an emerging discipline in organizational science where the central proposition is that the increasing complexity of products and services being developed and delivered, means that the knowledge required for production is increasingly specialized, varied (multi-disciplinary) and distributed across the organization's internal boundaries, and as a result there is a need for organizations to continuously gather their knowledge resources in order to maintain their ability to innovate, and to sustain their competitive position in the market. In addition, the increasing scale and scope of organizational arrangements, such as multinational partnerships or multi-tiered prime-supplier arrangements commonly encountered in the aerospace, automotive and other complex product development industries, also give rise to environments of dispersed knowledge resources, thus necessitating the subsequent integration of this knowledge across external boundaries spanning large-scale organizational networks. Knowledge integration in this context is done through a process of transferring knowledge from multiple sources in the organizational network to where it is needed, combining it with existing knowledge, before it can be applied to accomplish complex tasks and to solve major problems. The primary purpose of this paper is to define the powerful concept of knowledge integration in large-scale organizational networks using an extensive review of the pertinent literature on knowledge in organizations. An operational definition for knowledge integration is also proposed, followed by a systematic identification and classification of the different strategies, practices, channels and mechanisms for integrating different types of knowledge across a multitude of organizational boundaries and environments.

Team Performance in Flood Emergency Response: A Conceptual Model and Scale Development

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A Model of Organization Knowledge Management Maturity

“…It is crucial for the organization to have definite objects and aims through implementing knowledge management. Most knowledge management projects have one of six aims: 1) to make knowledge visible and show the role of knowledge in an organization, mainly through maps, yellow pages, and hyper-text tools; 2) to develop a knowledge-intensive culture by encouraging and aggregating behaviors such as knowledge sharing (as opposed to hoarding) and proactively seeking and offering knowledge [10]; 3) to make the enterprise act as intelligently as possible to secure its viability and overall success; 4) to otherwise realize the best value of its knowledge assets [11]; 5) to formulate a organization culture based on learning knowledge and using knowledge. 6) to make the organization adapt to the dynamic marketing environment.…”

Knowledge integration between technical change and strategy making

“…Hence, we build on the knowledge-based view of the firm (Grant 1996) and the concepts of combinative capabilities (Kogut and Zander 1992) and architectural knowledge (Henderson 1992) as well as, crucially, of systems integration (Prencipe 1997;Prencipe 2000). Various definitions of knowledge integration are present in the literature (for a review, see Haddad and Bozdogan 2009). Yet, intra-firm studies converge in identifying the collaboration of specialists as the primary enabler for knowledge integration.…”