Knowledge Dividend

Abstract

The central insight of the knowledge in organizations is that knowledge inputs are necessarily embedded in a context — cognitive and behavioural, individual and social — which powerfully constrains their discovery, their transfer from one set of actors to another, and their usefulness in different situations (Postrel, 1999). This insight, implicitly or explicitly, drives discussions of path dependence in capabilities (Penrose, 1959) (according to autopoietic epistemology, what you already know biases what you are likely to learn next), imitation of others’ technologies (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990) (absorbing new ideas requires a basis of prior knowledge), and transfer of best practices from one site to another (Nelson and Winter, 1982; Kogut and Zander, 1992; Zander and Kogut, 1995) (routines often rely on a context of tacit cues from other people or from machines, which must be articulated in an understandable way in order to be replicated).