Today, firms are facing many contradictions: efficiency versus creativity; exploitation versus exploration; speed versus time-consuming resource building. This paper argues that a firm's capability to synthesize such contradictions is the key to understanding why a firm can be more efficient at...

The knowledge-based view of the firm views a firm as a knowledge-creating entity, and argues that knowledge and the capability to create and utilize such knowledge are the most important source of a firm's sustainable competitive advantage. Knowledge and skills give a firm a competitive...

This article claims that effective strategic management requires distributed wisdom (which the philosopher Aristotle called “phronesis”). Strategy is created out of one's existential belief or commitment to a vision of the future, the ability to interpret one's environment and resources...

The theory of the knowledge-creating firm explains the differences among firms not as a result of market failure, but as a result of the firm's visions of the future and strategy. This paper proposes a framework to capture the dynamic process of knowledge creation in which knowledge is created...

Intangible resources are the source of competitive advantage in theknowledge economy. Knowledge and intellectual capital within firms havegathered worldwide attention; theories and methods for knowledgecreation management have been developed for organizations and alliances.Economic reality shows...

How can a company become sustainably innovative? We propose that the company needs to have organizational forms that achieve a dynamic synthesis of knowledge exploration and exploitation. In this paper, we present the “dynamic fractal organization” as a new organizational model. This model...

Service activities are now acknowledged as key players in economic development, societal change and public policy worldwide. This exciting Handbook not only contributes to ongoing conceptual debates about the nature of service-led economies and societies; it also pushes back the frontiers of...

Karl Weick, in The Social Psychology of Organizing, theorized in effect that organizational learning must be governed by a theory of action. Such a theory can be described in terms of variety amplification by senior managers and variety reduction by junior managers. In a study of senior American...

While innovation and knowledge creation processes and context are interlinked in the real world, scholars frequently ignore or separate context from knowing due to an entrenched sense of ontological and analytical dualism. This paper builds on the organizational knowledge creation theory...