Knowledge transfer in multinational corporations

Abstract and Key Results

The importance of language in global teams: A linguistic perspective

Abstract and Key Results

Learning through international acquisitions: The process of knowledge acquisition in China

Abstract and Key Results

The nature and determinants of exclusivity rights in international technology licensing

Existing research on international licensing focuses on firm decisions related to the choice of licensing versus alternative modes of entry into foreign markets, the timing of licensing within the technology life cycle, and appropriate compensation structures to collect rents. This paper complements and extends this stream of research by focusing on decisions related to granting exclusive licensing rights to a technology in foreign markets. The decision surrounding licensing exclusivity is based on the consideration of monopoly rents, technology transfer costs and transaction costs. Factors related to the nature of the technology being licensed, the foreign market environment in which it is licensed, and the characteristics of licensor and licensee firms are likely to influence the choice between exclusive and non-exclusive licensing in a particular foreign market. Propositions developed in the paper incorporate the direct and interaction effects of these three set of variables in predicting exclusivity decisions in international technology licensing.     

Towards a conceptual model of procedural knowledge degradation

Research has derived a dynamic range of theories associated with the acquisition of knowledge. In contrast, the current research seeks mechanisms by which acquired knowledge degrades, as well as mechanisms that could be computationally modelled. For procedural tasks, such as product assembly or supervisory control, variables including interference can inhibit the ability to retrieve procedural knowledge in different ways than the retrieval of declarative knowledge like phone numbers. High consequence tasks, such as air traffic control or maintenance on nuclear weapons, require proficiency to be maintained. Thus, an understanding of mechanisms that might complicate effective performance could improve approaches to job design. To explore theoretical underpinnings for procedural knowledge degradation, three areas of literature were explored. The areas included theoretical, computational, and ecological research. The literature serves as input for a conceptual model of procedural knowledge degradation.     

Effective practices in design transfer

The notion of transferring existing design solutions to new design problems is a basic one. Transfer provides a means of tackling increasing complexity, of limiting risks and costs, and of capitalizing on experience. In practice, in design organizations, it can be hard to judge the outcome of transfer because there can be several, often obscure benefits and drawbacks. This work is therefore an attempt to identify effective practices towards transfer on the part of designers and design managers. It is based on a qualitative analysis of 50 unstructured interviews carried out with members of two commercial design organizations. The practices were classified inductively in 15 main categories, of which the most heavily populated were associativity-improving, criteria-broadening, effort-reducing, environment-influencing, error-averting and motivation-addressing. The results have both a practical relevance (since most of the effective practices could be readily taught to novice designers) and a more theoretical relevance (showing what designers believe makes design transfer problematic).     

The development and sharing of knowledge by Centres of Excellence and transnational teams: A conceptual framework

Abstract and Key Results

Measuring the quality of knowledge work

There is a variety of ways to measure the quality of knowledge work. The best selection for a particular application depends on how the user defines quality and the intended use of the measure. This paper catalogues possible measures according to five different perspectives on quality and four different uses of quality measures. It concludes with some recommendations for measuring quality in a laboratory.     

The productivity of knowledge mobilisation,knowledge capitalisation and product-related firm transmutation: exploring the case of small-scale garment-makers in Nairobi,Kenya

Highlighting the limitations of R&D, this paper champions design activity as the phenomenon that captures knowledge mobilisation at the firm level, especially amongst small firms in developing countries. Still, knowledge becomes a capital (factor input) proper when employed in production. Volumes of new products sold could suggest the market value of utilised knowledge capital the same way the resale value of plant and equipment often approximates the stock of physical capital. Conversely, shares of sales of new products arguably capture an altogether different phenomenon: product-related firm transmutation. Findings suggest that the deeper utilisation of knowledge has significant productivity effects and supersedes mere mobilisation of knowledge. Further, undergoing transmutation towards the production of more of new products relative to incumbent products has no significant relationship with labour productivity. Firms should therefore prioritise the deeper exploitation of given new knowledge rather than potentially prodigal shifts in production towards new products as such.     

Computation vs knowledge in materials innovation

The title above reflects a statement by David McCullough, who said, ”Information is a wonderful thing, but it is not knowledge. You wouldn’t be educated if you managed to memorize the entire encyclopedia. You would be weird” [1]. Paralleling this theme, the theoretical physicist, Volker Heine, once said, ”How often have I read a paper about a piece of computational physics which finishes with the words ’and we obtain good agreement with experiment.’ If you know the answer from experiment, I want to cry, why are you wasting so much time calculating it?” Why indeed?     

Developing manufacturing ontologies for knowledge reuse in distributed manufacturing environment

The use of ontologies for knowledge sharing and distributed collaboration has been widely recognised in the knowledge modelling community, but the lack of a systematic and constructive methodology for developing manufacturing ontologies has impeded their wide usage for knowledge reuse in distributed manufacturing environments. This paper presents a constructive, two-level knowledge modelling approach to systematically develop manufacturing ontologies using both software engineering and Semantic Web paradigms. The UML/OCL (Unified Modeling Language/Object Constraint Language)-based object modelling is used first to serve as a graphical and structured basis for conceptual communication between domain experts and knowledge engineers. The OWL/SWRL (Web Ontology Language/Semantic Web Rule Language)-based ontology modelling then extends the UML/OCL-based object models with added semantics using a progressive, semantics-oriented knowledge acquisition method. An illustrative example for manufacturing ontology development in the manufacturing industry for producing electronic connectors is used to demonstrate the practicality of the proposed approach.     

The relative importance of international vis-a-vis national technological spillovers for market share dynamics

The aim of the paper is to investigate the relative importanceof international vis-à-vis national technological linkagesfor international competitiveness for 19 industrial sectors.We estimate a dynamic model with an autoregressive structurein the dependent variable. In the paper competitiveness is capturedboth by cost competitiveness and by technological competitiveness.The main result is that while national linkages have a positiveimpact on the trade balance in several sectors (mostly scaleintensive and specialised suppliers), this is not the case forinternational linkages.     

Computer aided teaching in civil engineering materials science at the University of Stuttgart

During the past five years the Institute of Construction Materials at the University of Stuttgart (IWB) has participated in different projects concerning e-teaching. Amongst other efforts co-workers of IWB have created a set of virtual content concerning concrete technology within a German e-teaching network in civil engineering materials science called “WiBA-Net” (). The content of this network consists of teaching material that is organized at four different levels of granularity. At the most basic level single items (“assets”) are collected. At the second level such assets are arranged into single pages filling one screen. Several pages dealing with aspects of a single topic are ordered into a teaching path at the third level and finally a set of teaching paths forms an entire course at level four. Virtual searching methods are offered on all four levels depending on the state of the user. Besides the mentioned teaching material also virtual communication facilities are offered within the network. During the work on WiBA-Net, which consists of six German Universities, questions concerning the reusability of virtual content, metadata enhancement techniques and the concept of Blended Learning were focused. Educational and didactic aspects have been closely taken into account and quality assuring evaluation methods have been applied. Meanwhile first experiences have been made in real life teaching and learning situations, which give us an idea of future needs and development in the field.     

Optimal degree of openness in open innovation: A perspective from knowledge acquisition & knowledge leakage

Open innovation has become an important mode for firms to improve innovation performance. If the openness is too low, it will reduce the opportunity to acquire external knowledge, while too open will increase the risk of internal knowledge leakage. Therefore, the degree of openness plays a key role in the use of open innovation to improve innovation performance. We use the openness breadth and openness depth to describe the openness of innovation. We conduct an agent-based simulation methodology to study the optimal degree of openness. Our findings show that there are great differences in the optimal degree of openness under different situations. Moreover, as the situation changes, the optimal degree of openness changes regularly. More specifically, the more a firm's knowledge network structure holes, the smaller the optimal openness breadth and the greater the optimal openness depth. The higher a firm's knowledge network centrality, the greater the optimal openness breadth and the smaller the optimal openness depth. The worse the institutional environment, the smaller the optimal openness breadth and openness depth. The fiercer the market competition, the greater the optimal openness breadth and the smaller the optimal openness depth.     

Knowledge sharing behaviors in social media

PurposeUsers on Social Media (SM) platforms make many decisions related to content sharing, such as whether to create or reuse content, whether to label for easy access by an interest group or not, and whether to disseminate to targeted individuals or broadcast to general audiences. In this study, we investigated if these content-related strategies on SM, called social media knowledge sharing behaviors, are determined by user characteristics.MethodologyUsing concepts from Self-Motivation Theory and the Affordance Theory, we examined if the knowledge sharing behaviors are influenced or correlated with user characteristics, such as the intensity of engagement on SM, a strong preference attitude for a SM platform, and multiple functional intentions for using SM. Based on this survey study of one hundred and twenty-three subjects, we developed hierarchical regression analyses to test if the SM user's knowledge decisions (Creation, Framing and Targeting) are corelated with the user's online usage intensity, their SM online platform preferences, and their functional intentions (Intensity, Preferences and Functionality). We complemented the regression models with a more comprehensive path analysis for an integrative hypothesis testing.FindingsThe main findings show that knowledge creation and knowledge targeting behaviors were correlated with multiple functional intentions (or needs) of users, meaning that users who utilized SM in order to fulfill many needs create and broadcast knowledge more than users that utilized SM in order to fulfill fewer needs.OriginalityThe study investigates the relationship between detailed knowledge sharing behaviors afforded by the social media tools and different user self-determination factors, such as intensity, preference and needs. This study further describes the attributes of social media sharing as a bundle of content sharing strategies of creation, sharing and targeting, which are used differently based on different user characteristics and motivations.     

Experimental validation of a particle-based method for heat transfer incorporating interstitial gas conduction in dense granular flow using a rotary drum

Conductive heat transfer in granular material is important in many industrial processes. For dense systems where the materials have low thermal conductivity, much of the heat transfer will occur through interstitial gases. Industry requires flexible and efficient computational methods to capture these phenomena at scale. In this study, a recently proposed particle-based model that includes the contribution of the interstitial gases was validated using an experiment. This model was originally derived from a multi-scale analysis of static, random packings. To test this approach in dense, dynamic systems, the model results were compared to experimental data for glass beads in an indirectly heated rotating drum. Infrared (IR) thermography was used to track the temperature evolution of the glass beads and the drum wall temperature. Discrete element simulations were performed with the experimental wall temperature used as a transient wall boundary condition. Results from the simulation show good agreement with the experimental data both for the bulk average temperature and for the bed profile, demonstrating the model’s ability to capture the gas contribution in dynamic systems.     

The transfer length in concrete structures repaired with composite materials: a survey of some analytical models and simplified approaches

This work focuses on the closed-form solutions for the shear distribution that takes place in the adhesive between composite and concrete in RC structures repaired with composite plates. Three different loading cases are studied. It is shown that the exact shear stress distributions, which are rather complicated, can be simplified to provide very similar expressions in the three studied cases. The main parameters that govern the shear distribution are then clearly highlighted. This leads to an easy understanding of the influence of some geometrical and material parameters on the shear distribution, as illustrated through a parametric study.     

Interactive knowledge exchanges under complex social relations: A simulation model of a developing country cluster

This is a model of knowledge exchange by informal interaction among agents in a low technology cluster. The paper studies these knowledge exchanges in an environment of complex social relations. This study tests whether the small-world network structure is the most favorable for knowledge exchanges in these environments, and explores the influence of social relations and network distance on magnitude and equity of knowledge diffused. The results show that, when knowledge exchanges are undertaken in environments of complex social relations, a small-world network structure may still be the best network structure facilitating the highest performance, but it is not the best in terms of the most equitable knowledge distribution. The results also confirms that the highest and most equitable knowledge distribution is achieved when there is perfect affinity among the agents. These results contribute to the existing series of studies on efficient network structures for knowledge diffusion, and on the broader literature on the social forces shaping learning and knowledge diffusion.     

The configuration of design and manufacture knowledge models from a heavyweight ontological foundation

Problems related to knowledge sharing in design and manufacture, for supporting automated decision-making procedures, are associated with the inability to communicate the full meaning of concepts and their intent within and across system boundaries. To remedy these issues, it is important that the explicit structuring of semantics, i.e., meaning in computation form, is first performed and that these semantics become sharable across systems. This paper proposes an expressive (heavyweight) Common Logic-based ontological foundation as a basis for capturing the meaning of generic feature-oriented design and manufacture concepts. This ontological foundation serves as a semantic ground over which design and manufacture knowledge models can be configured in an integrity-driven way. The implications involved in the specification of the ontological foundation are discussed alongside the types of mechanisms that allow knowledge models to be configured. A test case scenario is then analysed in order to further support and verify the researched approach.     

Beyond the joint-venture: knowledge sourcing in Chinese automotive events

Abstract

This article analyses how firms use events and trade fairs for external knowledge sourcing, which barriers emerge and how event organisers strategically mediate and influence those processes. The research setting focuses on two major automotive events in Shanghai, highlighting that knowledge sourcing in these events do complement other types of knowledge accessed in permanent ‘sites’ and organisational configurations, such as in clusters and through joint-ventures. Firms use automotive events to access buzz, to monitor other firms and to explore options for new collaborations. Yet, it is also argued that a focus on existing relations, the defensive strategies deployed by lead firms and the intrinsic complexity of exhibited technologies hinder the process of knowledge sourcing that is influenced by event organisers’ content, matchmaking and access policies.