Inter-Organizational Knowledge Transfer: Current Themes and Future Prospects

By Mark Easterby-Smith, Marjorie A. Lyles, Eric W. K. Tsang. 2008

946 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many papers have been published recently in the fields of strategy and international business research incorporating the role of organizational knowledge as a basis of firm competitive advantage. While such knowledge is normally developed within the firm, it is important that firms possess the ability to learn from others in order to meet the increasing pace of competition. Knowledge transfer, defined here as an event through which one organization learns from the experience of another, has thus become an important research area within the broader domain of organizational learning and knowledge management. This paper presents a theoretical framework, identifies key themes covered by the six articles included in the Special Issue on Inter-Organizational Knowledge Transfer, and then discusses priorities for future research.

Subfields: Communication, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3cc1a047befcaf2e15736e709c4bfc8f488490b4

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Citations in the corpus

An exploration of multinational enterprise knowledge resources and foreign subsidiary performance (2013, background): “Finally, while this study focuses on addressing the transfer of multiple knowledge resources, future research can look at how knowledge of different dimensions (e.g., explicit versus tacit) interacts with each other during parent– subsidiary transfer (Easterby-Smith et al., 2008).”
Learning and Innovation in International Strategic Alliances: An Empirical Test of the Role of Trust and Tacitness (2009, background): “The link between learning and innovation has received little systematic attention in the alliance literature (see Easterby-Smith et al., 2008; van Wijk et al., 2008).”
Transfer mechanisms and knowledge transfer: The cooperative competency perspective (2014, background): “Transfer mechanisms are the way that recipient firms involve in replicating or adapting the knowledge from the sending firms (Easterby-Smith et al., 2008; Mason & Leek, 2008).”
Organizational learning research: Past, present and future (2011, background): “Through knowledge transfer, one unit is affected by the experience of another (Argote and Ingram, 2000) or learns vicariously (Bandura, 1977) from the experience of other units (see Easterby-Smith et al., 2008, for a review of research on inter-organizational learning).”
The dark side of knowledge transfer: Exploring knowledge leakage in joint R&D projects (2015, background): “Multiple authors have used the term “leakage” in knowledge management or open innovation research (Becerra et al., 2008; Chesbrough, 2007a; Easterby-Smith et al., 2008; Gambardella and McGahan, 2010; Meyer, 2008; Ritala et al., 2014).”
Expatriate Knowledge Transfer, Subsidiary Absorptive Capacity, and Subsidiary Performance (2012, background): “Prior research has also suggested that cultural differences between source and recipient hamper knowledge acquisition (Easterby-Smith et al., 2008; van Wijk et al., 2008).”
Absorbing the Concept of Absorptive Capacity (2009, background): “Knowledge stocks and flows are also constructs that are related to the recognition, assimilation, and utilization of new knowledge (Foss 2006). A number of researchers have used “knowledge stock” concepts and measures to access firm level AC. For example, Nicholls-Nixon (1993) examines AC in the pha”