Thalmann Stefan, Manhart Markus
2016
Organizations join networks to acquire external knowledge. This is especially important for SMEs since they often lack resources and are dependent on external knowledge to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. However, finding the right balance between measures facilitating knowledge sharing and measures protecting knowledge is a challenge. Whilst sharing is the raison d’être of networks, neglecting knowledge protection can be also detrimental to network, e.g., lead to one-sided skimming of knowledge. We identified four practices SMEs currently apply to balance protection of competitive knowledge and knowledge sharing in the network: (a) share in subgroups with high trust, (b) share partial aspects of the knowledge base, (c) share with people with low proximities, and (d) share common knowledge and protect the crucial. We further found that the application of the practices depends on the maturity of the knowledge. Further, we discuss how the practices relate to organizational protection capabilities and how the network can provide IT to support the development of these capabilities.
Thalmann Stefan, Ilvonen Ilona, Manhart Markus , Sillaber Christian
2016
New ways of combining digital and physical innovations, as well as intensified inter-organizational collaborations, create new challenges to the protection of organizational knowledge. Existing research on knowledge protection is at an early stage and scattered among various research domains. This research-in-progress paper presents a plan for a structured literature review on knowledge protection, integrating the perspectives of the six base domains of knowledge, strategic, risk, intellectual property rights, innovation, and information technology security management. We define knowledge protection as a set of capabilities comprising and enforcing technical, organizational, and legal mechanisms to protect tacit and explicit knowledge necessary to generate or adopt innovations.