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Proceedings of the International Forum on Knowledge Asset Dynamics, 12th edition, Knowledge Management in the 21st Century: Resilience, Creativity and Co-creation, IFKAD 2017
The acknowledgment of the knowledge-based nature of today’s economy and of organisations points out that knowledge workers and knowledge processes are at the basis of organisations competitiveness and knowledge management is a necessary dimension connecting operations and strategy in order to translate knowledge into organisational performance and value outputs and impacts. However, the ability of an organisation to prosper is linked not only to its capacity of managing and developing its knowledge resources, but most importantly to the identification of those cognitive resources that have strategic relevance for the future success of the organisation, i.e. the organisational knowledge assets. Indeed, knowledge assets contribute to the definition of the value of an organisation both from a static and a dynamic perspective. From static point of view, knowledge assets such as, for example, patents, brand, culture, core competences, identity and image, and so on, stand for most of the market value of today’s company. The notion of intellectual capital has been introduced in the management and economic literature to represent those assets explaining the difference from the market value and the book value of today’s knowledge intensive companies. On the other hand, most importantly knowledge assets define the roots of value creation dynamics. They are the value drivers to execute organisational processes that in turn explain organisational performance. This involves the definition of knowledge management initiatives as strategizing planned actions connecting business strategy and every day operation management. The formulation and implementation of a strategy define the route that an organisation leadership undertake to navigate the business landscape by coping with an unknown world by continuously projecting and revising strategic objectives to be achieved. In order to operate, organisations need to develop their knowledge domains that in turn define organisational capabilities, skills and competences. Knowledge strategies are aimed to maintain and growth organisational knowledge. Although knowledge management is still not fully acknowledged as a mainstream managerial discipline with all business schools dedicating courses on the subject, it represents a fundamental management and economic research area with fundamental implications to understand organisations, their working mechanisms and value creation dynamics, and the ways how organisations interact and shape the business landscape. The mission of IFKAD is the development of research and scientific conversations aimed to contribute to theory-building as well as to the managerial practice about the role of knowledge as an organisational value-driven source. Our view is that organisations are primarily in the business of knowledge and from their capacity of managing knowledge depends their future business sustainability and value creation capacity.
