The Process of Knowledge Transfer: A Diachronic Analysis of Stickiness

By Gabriel Szulanski. 2000

1,947 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Even though intrafirm transfers of knowledge are often laborious, time consuming, and difficult, current conceptions treat them as essentially costless and instantaneous. When acknowledged, difficulty is an anomaly in the way transfers are modeled rather than a characteristic feature of the transfer itself. One first step toward incorporating difficulty in the analysis of knowledge transfer is to recognize that a transfer is not an act, as typically modeled, but a process. This article offers a process model of knowledge transfer. The model identifies stages of transfer and factors that are expected to correlate with difficulty at different stages of the transfer. The general expectation is that factors that affect the opportunity to transfer are more likely to predict difficulty during the initiation phase, whereas factors that affect the execution of the transfer are more likely to predict difficulty during subsequent implementation phases. Measures of stickiness are developed for each stage of the transfer to explore the predictive power of different factors at different stages of the process. A cross-sectional analysis of primary data collected through a two-step survey of 122 transfers of organizational practices within eight firms illustrates the applicability of the model and suggests several issues for further research.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2a0506c377b1e95b1e7e026452698c5a43f7ea89

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Entrepreneurial Opportunities and Poverty Alleviation (2014, background): “The entrepreneur must influence users’ perceptions and attitudes that will affect the successful implementation of the new opportunity (Szulanski, 2000).”
KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER: A BASIS FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN FIRMS (2000, background): “Szulanski (2000) analyzed how characteristics of the source of knowledge, the recipient, the context, and the knowledge itself affected transfer.”
Organizational Capabilities, Patterns of Knowledge Accumulation and Governance Structures in Business Firms: An Introduction (2008, background): “Moreover, managerial tasks involve: (4) presiding over the replication within the organization of well-performing bundles of routines (Szulanski 2000; Winter 2003); (5) defining the cognitive frames and the aspiration levels of the organization (this includes the shared ‘representations’ and…”
Exploring Perceptions of Organizational Ownership of Information and Expertise (2001, background): “Because internal knowledge sharing and external knowledge sharing are fundamentally different in their purposes and consequences [1, 49], we explore if the antecedents to ownership beliefs are different depending on whether sharing occurs internally or externally.”
Transferring, Translating, and Transforming: An Integrative Framework for Managing Knowledge Across Boundaries (2004, background): “Empirical studies (Epple, et al., 1991; Szulanski, 2000; Argote and Darr, 2001) show that successful knowledge transfer requires mutual learning and an adaptive process.”
Network Learning: Exploring Learning by Interorganizational Networks (2002, background): “The process of knowledge transfer is ‘sticky’ (Szulanski, 2000).”
Dominant Logic and Entrepreneurial Firms‘ Performance in a Transition Economy (2010, background): “Intangible resources are by definition not easily transferred (Szulanski, 2000), harder to imitate than tangible assets, exhibit time compression diseconomies (Dierickx & Cool, 1989), and are difficult to trade on the market for resources (Barney, 1986).”
Competing through operations and supply: The role of classic and extended resource‐based advantage (2010, background): “) are best suited to the transfer of codified technical-type information and are difficult for the transfer of richer knowledge ( Szulanski, 1996, 2000”
Knowledge Sharing Through Expatriate Relationships: A Social Capital Perspective (2007, background): “The term “knowledge transfer” typically refers to a formally organized activity with specific boundaries (Szulanski 2000), but “knowledge sharing” relates to a wider range of knowledge exchanges in interpersonal and organizational interaction.”
Exploitative and exploratory innovations in emerging economies: The role of realized absorptive capacity and learning intent (2019, background): “Besides local suppliers’ learning intent, a knowledge-abundant MNE’s willingness to transfer knowledge to local suppliers might influence the local firms’ ACAP development based on the existing literature (see e.g. Wang, et al., 2004; Steensma & Lyles, 2000; Szulanski, 2000).”
A Multilevel Investigation of the Motivational Mechanisms Underlying Knowledge Sharing and Performance (2007, background): “, task-specific selfconfidence, Bandura 1997) and self-set goals, and the subsequent influence self-set goals have on performance, have been well established in prior literature (Bandura 1997, Locke and Latham 1990), researchers have suggested that other factors besides the recipient’s goals influen”
Disrupted Routines: Team Learning and New Technology Implementation in Hospitals (2001, methodology): “Many studies emphasize the need for organizations to adapt for a new technology to be effectively used (Barley, 1986; Attewell, 1992; Orlikowski, 1993, 2000; Szulanski, 2000).”
KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER THROUGH INHERITANCE: SPIN- OUT GENERATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND SURVIVAL (2004, background): “As a result, " organizations may not necessarily know all that they know " (Szulanski, 2000: 10) and fall short of fully exploiting their know-how (von Hippel, 1994).”
Performance Implications of Firm Resource Interactions in the Acquisition of R&D-Intensive Firms (2008, background): “When transferring resources, a search involving some degree of irreducible uncertainty must occur (Szulanski 2000).”
Balancing global and local strategic contexts: expatriate knowledge transfer, applications, and learning within a transnational organization (2007, background): “For example, some researchers differentiate knowledge search from its transfer (Hansen, 2002; Hansen et al, 2005), whilst others include both but also include knowledge adaptation as a transfer activity (Szulanski, 2000).”
Knowledge withholding: psychological hindrance to the innovation diffusion within an organisation (2016, background): “…knowledge sharing among organisational members (Voelpel et al, 2005; Riss et al, 2007; Horwitz & Santillan, 2012) and in spite of the numerous efforts by companies and managers, effective knowledge sharing has proven difficult to attain in many organisations (Szulanski, 2000; Smith et al, 2010).”