Knowledge Management in business networks: new challenges and critical issues

Inter-firm relationships are increasingly complex. Due to the diffusion of ICTs and the global competition, new organizational structures are emerging, often referred to as extended enterprises, global business networks, knowledge networks, virtual enterprises, etc. Actually, in order to pursue their strategies effectively, companies need to be embedded into a network of relationships with several economic players, and to perform complex exchanges of knowledge. Accordingly, the individual firm must be capable to manage knowledge coming from suppliers, customers, competitors, service providers, public organizations, trade associations, etc. The discipline of Knowledge Management (KM) has emerged in recent years as “branch” of the managerial science. The research in that area has shed light on the nature of organizational knowledge processes and on the issue of how to manage it. However, most of the relevant literature still focuses on the knowledge generated, transferred, and used within the single organization, while limited efforts have been devoted to the issue of managing knowledge across organizations. On the contrary, managing knowledge coming from outside raises specific issues and requires peculiar practices and tools. Thus, there is a need to translate and re-frame KM notions and practices to adapt them for the management of the business network knowledge flows, and this is a challenging task. In particular, inter-organizational knowledge exchanges may be difficult due to the lack of common goals, languages, values, and mental schemes. In this sense, the cognitive distance or gap that separate the partners of a network makes the sharing of (really) useful knowledge difficult. On the other hand, the same cognitive distance can be of value (in other words, one has no need to share knowledge with others that know exactly the same things): so the effective “functioning” of a knowledge network involves the subdivision of “cognitive tasks” among its nodes. The paper proposes a preliminary analysis of the specific factors and problems that characterize the management of knowledge in business networks. In particular, these points will be addressed: a) a survey of the (scarce) literature on knowledge network management, that highlights some essential concepts and issues about the sharing of knowledge inside a group of companies linked by networked relationships; b) a description of the results of some recent empirical investigations made by the authors, to provide evidence about the issues emerged from the literature; c) based on the previous points, a brief discussion of the main critical factors affecting KM in business networks