Constructing and Sustaining Competitive Knowledge Networks: an exploratory analysis
Ray Hackney , Zahir Irani Brunel University, UK Kevin C. Desouza University of Washington, USA
Abstract The research in this paper considers the complex and dynamic arrangements for potential and actual knowledge sharing in inter-organizational networks. The issue is to determine the nature and extent of the degree of agreement that may be achieved as competitors either co-operate or continue to compete in the face of challenging and pervasive market conditions. The theory relating to network formulation is reviewed and findings from empirical analyse undertaken of the experiences from automobile distributors in a large USA city and one scientific collaborators network are presented. A framework is proposed identifying the factors necessary to initially construct the network and then to further sustain it over time. A number of lessons learned are developed which are believed to be of value to researchers and practitioners engaged in these processes. Introduction Inter-organizational networks become highly prevalent as organizations are motivated to collaborate with business partners to achieve their goals and objectives (Galaskiewicz, 1985; Gulati et al., 2000; Kranton and Minehart, 2000; Davenport et al, 2003). Traditionally, each organization has focused, and specialized, capabilities that are drivers of its value creation in the marketplace (Heaton and Taylor, 2002). It is unlikely that any organization can be expected to have capabilities in all areas of need. Hence, they may collaborate with other firms to secure resources in areas outside their domains (Li, 2002). The formation of networks, across boundaries, is not exclusive to the organizational level. Individuals forge alliances with their peers in other organizations (Cross et al., 2003; Cross and Prusak, 2002; Iverson and McPhee, 2002). The study of social networks among individuals has been a topic of recent practitioner and scholarly interest (Cross et al., 2002). The critical ingredient that moves within these networks is knowledge. Knowledge takes the form of experiences, insights, expertise, and explicit information (Nonaka, 1991; McInerney, 2002). Thus these networks can be considered knowledgeintensive. However, while inter-organizational networks are common among entities very few organizations implement arrangements to collaborate with recognized competitors (Siemieniuch and Sinclair, M; 2004; Hackney, et al, 2005). Similarly, there has been little research on networks of individuals that are direct competitors (Wasko and Faraj, 2005). This paper presents insights on the dynamics of competitive knowledge
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Pg15-2 networks from the examination of two knowledge networks that involved direct competitors. There are compelling reasons for many organizations to consider co-operating to in an attempt to ‘freeze-out’ competition (Desouza, 2003). The research in this paper considers US car dealer’s network in this respect where international market pressure is significantly high. For example, the future of Ford and its distributor dealers is at a critical stage in its 103 year history set against tough overseas competition. Its supply chain must be adaptive, dynamic and innovative if it is to improve the value proposition to its customers. Ford lost $7.2 billion in the first 9 months of 2006 with full years performance reported at an all time low of $8.5 billion losses. These are the worst results in its corporate history mainly through a significant decline in 4*4 truck sales due to Japanese competition. The company could usefully consider a more intelligent approach to its supply chain management where respective ‘home’ dealers co-operate to reduce the impact of a highly competitive market place. Similarly, today, there is a move in academic and research circles to form inter-disciplinary research teams to address complex problems. The thinking driving this realization is that complex problems cannot be solved by one discipline or a singular view of the problem. Moreover, also within a discipline, especially in the health and engineering sciences, there is a pressure towards brining multiple sources of expertise to bear on a problem. Most funding agencies (e.g. the National Science Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council, among others) make it explicit in their calls for research that they would like to see greater instances of collaboration among researchers. In light of this pressure, researchers are trying for forge alliances with individuals they once considered their competitors for funding, discovery, and even fame. Building cooperative networks amongst competitive partners is one consideration which poses interesting challenges and requires significant political maneuvering. In this paper, we report on findings from an exploratory study that examined a cooperative network among competing car dealers and a cooperative network of scientific researchers who are all direct competitors in some form for research funding, such that others are able to extrapolate from our findings when applied to other business domains. The core issues addressed, for collaborating partners, is knowledge transfer among competing entities such that a business differentiation can be maintained. Knowledge Dynamics Knowledge possessed by an entity, whether it is an individual, group, organization, or an inter-organizational network, may be a source of commercial advantage (Adler, 2001; Spender, 1996; Grant 1996). This power comes from the scarcity of knowledge in its environment, which is a critical determinant of its value. Unless knowledge is scarce an organization will not be able to use it as a differentiating element when competing in the marketplace. In these circumstances knowledge should hence be held privately and should only be used to generate products and services that can be consumed by other entities. However, knowledge is also a social good. Entities must share their knowledge if they are to enrich their own knowledge collection, and also contribute towards the achievement of collective objectives. Employees, who are entities within the organization, must share knowledge to achieve project goals. Similarly, business partners must exchange knowledge so that they can achieve overall objectives (e.g. maximizing In Proceedings of the SoftWars 07 Conference on Social, Organizational and Economic Impact of Information Technology October 18-19, 2007 , ISEG, Lisbon, Portugal
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Pg15-3 performance of supply chains). Here in lies the dilemma – should an entity share its knowledge with other entities, especially its competitors, or should they choose to hold it privately (Evermann, 2005)? More specifically, how can organizations balance between cooperating and competing in terms of their knowledge assets? In this respect a business case may be compelling but the psychological ‘sense making’ for such a collaboration may be lacking given an obvious history of competitive engagement. Consequently, there is a real and present difficulty presented whereby an organization continues with its ‘competitive’ strategy or embarks upon a period of trialed cooperation with an existing marketplace challenger (Brown and Duguid, 2001)?. Certainly, the technological facilities to enable any collaboration exist through recent advances in information & communication technologies. As Daniel and White (2005) note; ‘There are electronic hubs, web services, widespread adoption of common enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and enterprise portals’. However, the objective of this paper is to consider the social and political mechanisms which enable or restrain these networks and consequently propose an approach for holistic business benefits. We studied one inter-organizational network, comprised of direct competitors, in a major US-Midwest metropolitan city. A group of automobile dealers decided to form a collaborative network to share cost and resources, and also improve the car sales of the individual dealers. Car dealers for a particular car manufacturer, for e.g. Ford, GM, decided to pool their resources together and create an Internet website – a co-opetition portal. The network consisted of local car dealers that sold a particular brand of cars. We gathered data through a series of interviews with each executive of the 12 involved. These were analyzed in a grounded theoretic framework to distill major themes such that we can draw from the case-description lessons learned. Therefore, we report on the goals that led to the creation of the network, and several guidelines that were deduced in terms of managing cooperative networks among competitors. We validated this data by comparing findings to those found in the study of a scientific collaboration network. One of the researchers has been an active member of this collaboration network. The scientific collaboration network involves 22 researchers, spanning 12 universities, and thee major academic disciplines (engineering, public policy and administration, and information sciences). The research network was put in place to bring together researchers who conduct investigations in national security problems. Traditionally, these researchers were competitors who knew of each other but never cooperated. Only upon the suggestion of a program officer at a funding agency, did the researchers begin to engage in cooperative and creative dialogues to foster collaboration on critical problems (Friedman, 2002). The network has been in existence for about nine months and has developed a research agenda, problem statements, and is in the midst of submitting several collaborative research proposals for funding. Findings from the examination of the car dealer network were presented to the scientific network. These findings were not only welcomed, but were also used to modify the behavior and processes of the scientific network to enable to effective knowledge transfer and to consider future plans for network expansion.
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Pg15-4 Organizational Context The goals of the co-opetition network were: (1) create a joint internet presence for the car dealers, (2) provide a space for each individual car dealer to advertise their products and services, and (3) to help each car dealer engage in dialogue with other dealers to share ideas, tips, strategies, concerns, and other information and knowledge. - joint-internet presence The first goal of creating a presence on the Internet for the car dealers was motivated by a simple premise – 'united we stand, divided we fall'. The car dealers who all sold cars from the same manufacturer were facing intense pressures from outsider dealers (i.e., those who sold cars from other manufactures). They hence decided that it was in their best interest to join forces and collaborate with one other, in other to compete with dealers who sold other cars. As one manager replied: “I would rather have the general public purchase XYX (brand of the cars) then go and purchase ABC (a rival brand of cars…) if enough customers feel the need to purchase an XYZ car, I can be confident that my business will increase.” It should be noted that this was the single most important reason that fuelled the creation of the collaborative Internet space. - advertise products and services The second goal of providing a venue for each dealer to advertise was what one might consider a “local and individual benefit”. Clearly, the dealers knew they were facing competition from websites such as Autotrader.com or Carmax.com. However, these tended to be more generic than specific to a particular manufacturer. They realized their very existence was being threatened, as other websites were providing the customer with a way to compare cars on multiple criteria such as prices, functionality, features, quality, etc. Moreover, websites such as Carmax.com quoted hassle-free prices i.e. the price you saw on the Internet was the one you purchased the car for without any hidden extras. This feature was one that of keen interest to the car dealers. Under the current process, the car dealers would post the Manufacture Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for each car. Then once the customer was interested in the car, through a process of negotiations and haggling, the two parties would agree on the actual price. If one was good at bargaining, one could pay less for the car than an individual who has less apt negotiating skills. With Carmax.com offering no-hassle prices and the ability to scan for used and news cars based on prices, the car dealers we spoke with were very concerned about losing their business. One respondent commented: “Carmax.com is becoming very popular…we have customers that come into our store and tell us that they found a car at a given price…if we do not meet their price or go lower than it…they will not buy…what is more interesting is at times we have lower prices than Carmax.com…we do however need to a better job getting the word out…A website where we can keep the prices updated will be a step in the right direction.” The dealers also had the added benefit of advertising on the Internet portal to monitor how their closest competitors, other dealers within the network were pricing their cars. Hence, if they wanted to under-cut all of the other dealers they could i.e. they could constantly price their cars a few hundred dollars lower than their competitors. However, this behavior did not occur, or at least was not perceived to occur on a frequent basis, one manager remarked:
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Pg15-5 “Yes we could obviously price our cars lower…however this would be a labor intensive task or continuously changing prices and playing the number game…in the end no one car dealer will be able to sustain car sales by moving prices up or down.” However, there was another reason for car dealers to constantly monitor the advertisements of their peers. Car dealers would routinely get customers that were comparison shoppers, they would play one car dealer against another. For example, a buyer may go to the first dealer and negotiate a price of $19,000 for the purchase of the car. The car dealer would then go to the second dealer and state that he had an offer from the other dealer at $18,000 ($19,000 was the offer but they lower it to get a low starting point for the negotiations). The second dealer, in the past, had no efficient way of verifying this information, as dealers did not share their quoted prices openly. Today, using the portal the dealers can share such information and avoid being taken for a ride by shoppers who want to a lower price. However, this raises the question of whether this technology enabled cooperative network is in the best interest of the consumer given that it now creates an opportunity for suppliers to price-fix. Each dealer can log onto the portal and check the validity of customer claims by looking at the current advertisements of their peers. - sharing knowledge The third goal of sharing of knowledge such as sales tips, strategies, etc was the slowest to grow as it required the greatest deal of trust. Only recently have car dealer begun to understand the need to leverage and share knowledge for competitive advantage. Based on our interviews, the most commonly cited motivator for knowledge sharing was the extensive competition in the car dealer market. This however may well be an outcome of the research strategy pursed and methods adopted. By this we mean, managers who were interviewed sold an “American Brand” car and hence, were facing competition from the Japanese car-dealers that have a more sophisticated supply chain network. One reason that added to the level of competition is the rising price of fuel. American cars, by far, are quite inferior to Japanese cars in terms of fuel efficiencies, maintenance, etc. A problem faced by the network in knowledge sharing was also one of “initiation”. The technology solution, which involved a discussion list on the Internet, with daily digests being emailed to managers, was ready. However, it took over five months before the first “knowledge nugget” was posted. During the initial five months, there were plenty of introductory types of postings, such as “Hi, I am Bob, I have ten years of experience in ... I like to do this…and I look forward to hearing from you.” Posting such as these would be followed by personal emails to the sender and more introductory postings on the portal. It was only after their second quarterly meeting (the various senior management representatives of car dealers would meet quarterly; the meeting would be hosted by one of the car dealers on a rotation basis), did all company representatives agree to take formalized measures to get knowledge sharing going. Three particular measures were agreed upon, (1) every week one manager from each organization would post a lessons learnt document. This document would detail any findings the manager learnt in the running of operations during that week, (2) on a rotation basis, each sales person would post their lessons learnt to the portal, and (3) every sales person and manager was required to logon to the portal at least twice a week and spend time either contributing insights or commenting on the existing insights. The measures help get the posting of knowledge initiated and it slowly started to take off. As In Proceedings of the SoftWars 07 Conference on Social, Organizational and Economic Impact of Information Technology October 18-19, 2007 , ISEG, Lisbon, Portugal
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Pg15-6 of December 2006, fourteen months after the system was commissioned there are roughly 1000 postings on the discussion lists. Issues to Construct the Network It is essential to have the right mix of partners involved in the co-opetition network. Partners must share common schemas, models, motives, and ways of work to cooperate. They must also share similar goals that motivate them to participate. In the co-opetition network described above, each partner faced economic pressures to participate in the network. They could not afford to be left out of the network, as the dealers within the network would have superior advantages due to the sharing of knowledge and information. When we asked a manager if they recognized and could identify their competitors, we got the following response: “Sure, we know our competitors…however do we really know who they are…a few months back we viewed any other car dealer as our competitor. It did not matter what brand of cars you sold, so long as you sold cars, you were our competitor…today, we realize that me must cooperate and gain strengths from others…hence, our definition of a competitor has changed, as long as you sell the same brand of cars as us we do not view you as a competitor…we view you as an ally, we do understand that in some way they are competing with us for sales, but at least they are not competing in terms of a different brand of cars.” Obviously, an organization’s definition of who their competitors are changes over time. Another critical issue in constructing the network is building trust among the partners. The other issue that is quite critical is the perception of trust among competitors. For a long time, car dealers of a particular brand would position their products and sales offerings to be superior to other dealers who sold the same brand of car. In other words, two Ford dealers, A and B, would argue that their “sales offerings” and “pricing schemes” were better than the other, they would not directly compete with the dealers who sold different brand of cars. This is now changing with uniform pricing schemes coming directly from the manufacturer of the products. For example, Ford has just commissioned the “Ford Family Plan”. This provides a uniform pricing plan, where anyone can purchase a Ford vehicle for the same price as an employee of Ford pays for the car (i.e. the average customer can take advantage of the Employee Discount Program). This results in equality among Ford dealers. They no longer compete with one another, rather they compete with dealers of other cars, so as to push more attention to their brand name. Trust between traditional competitors takes time to develop. This requires them to take small steps and make little gains rather than attempting a complete overhaul. The culture is individualistic in nature (e.g. each sales person is looking out for their commission as it determines their pay, and at the organizational level, each business is concerned about their bottom line). To make collaborative agreements work, the focus must be on the big picture or collective goal, in this case the betterment of the car brand and image, and through that increased sales for each organization in the network. This requires time for people to appreciate the big picture. It also requires a change in the current incentive schemes from their current state of valuing individualistic gains to more of a collective culture. They want to see that each member is cooperating and sharing before they increase the scope and nature of their cooperative arrangements. In Proceedings of the SoftWars 07 Conference on Social, Organizational and Economic Impact of Information Technology October 18-19, 2007 , ISEG, Lisbon, Portugal
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Car dealers have standards and frameworks in place to manage the competition issues. Most commonly all members are willing to join the network, but are reluctant to be the first to share their knowledge. Standards are important to ensure that there are commonly agreed terminology and protocols for effective interaction between partners in the network. In the above case, this was found in the creation of nomenclature for identifying cars and their types. These normally followed the well-accepted standards of shorthand such a 4WD and 4D to represent a four-wheel drive and a four-door car. Without standards in place, communication was extremely difficult for two reasons. First, communications was ineffective as knowledge shared lacked specify, will be ambiguous, and be incomplete. This will occur, as people will use different terms to mean different things. Second, communication was also less efficient and it will require efforts that are more laborious. For example, it requires more time to type “Four door black car” than “4D BLK”. Standards establish the operational rules of communication such as terminology. Frameworks help to ensure that each member is participating ideally. It is important for frameworks to be defined upfront. These should include: (1) a clear definition of the goals of the networks, (2) key activities each member will participate in, (3) definitions of what is considered as ideal conducting of the activity and also what will not be accepted during the conduct of the activity, and (4) metrics to evaluate the participation of the members. Issues to Sustain the Network Co-opetition networks are difficult to order or control, as they involve voluntary participation without a centralized controlling authority. They must be allowed to emerge from the bottom-up. This requires proactive decisions which enable the initiation of cooperation. In the current case, it was up to each member to get started by participating in the portal. This involved having members post information about the vehicles, get advertisements placed, and get started with knowledge sharing. Some were quicker to get started than others; this is a natural outcome of bringing together different organizations. Trying to order member participants to contribute or enforce rules on them will not work. This is because all organizations are in un-chartered waters, they are collaborating with their competitors, hence they need the time to work out the cultural issues and then make the small steps. If there is a dominant player in the network, it must set the example by being the first to participate and encouraging organizations it has close ties with to contribute, this effect should continue until all members have begun to utilize the network. All dealers attested that having top management commitment is essential. Top management should not only commit to the co-opetition endeavor but should also lead by example. In the current case, this involved having senior managers from the various dealers go to the location of other dealers, meet with the employees, and engage in dialogue. This demonstrated that the senior management was serious in their commitment to the philosophy of cooperation.
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Pg15-8 Discussion The issues raised between the dealers were clearly based upon their ‘sense-making’ of the potential business opportunities through engaging in the process of both initially constructing the network and then sustaining it (Southon, et al, 2002); Ibrahim and Nissen, 2005). A useful research finding from our study is to identify these factors and to illustrate their respective contributions to a knowledge sharing environment, as noted in Figure 1.
cooperate
process change
Sustain the Network ?
InterOrganizational Knowledge Sharing
process change
Construct the Network ?
compete Fig 1: Critical Issues in Managing Cooperative Networks among Competitors The critical issues of managing co-opetition inter-organizational networks may be segmented into the two categories noted. Firstly, what is required that is relevant for the construction of the network? Secondly, what do we need to ensure a sustained participation in the process as well as the growth of the network? 1) The creation of a joint-presence on the Internet actually points to the issues that the firms choose to co-operate on a goal that a single firm could not achieve. While each firm could have set up an independent web site that provided operating information (opening hours, stock, etc) the cost of a truly functional facility (database capabilities, real-time promotions, etc) was prohibited. Hence, a collective response generated a vested interest through technical co-operation. In Proceedings of the SoftWars 07 Conference on Social, Organizational and Economic Impact of Information Technology October 18-19, 2007 , ISEG, Lisbon, Portugal
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Pg15-9 2) The issue of having a space to advertise suggests a realization that they recognized the combined threat in the face of local competition. In these circumstances the opportunity to co-operate was compelling where business ‘sense-making’ prevailed over historic prejudices. The overall agreement to co-operate in an historically competitive environment is quite unique in many respects (Gilmour, 2003). In addition to the advantages realized there were of course a number of lessons learned for future market place strategies. In extrapolating from the data analysis undertaken there are several lessons that can be learnt for the construction and sustainability of the network. Consequently, a generic claim can be made for contextual competitive environments where decisions are being considered to enter into similar business arrangements. • Inter-organizational networks are facilitated by knowledge sharing for supply chain capacity building and consolidation in competitive environments • The opportunity to co-operate is motivated through trust and business ‘sensemaking’ in the face of significant competitive challenges. In effect the automobile distributors created a virtual ‘non-competitive’ situation to formulate a collective and innovative counter action to actual local competitors. They consequently generated a ‘micro-world’ of focused activity and enacted a knowledge sharing framework for their own business advantage (Cummings, 2004). The idea of the scientific network collaboration originated in the minds of three researchers who were connected by a Program Officer at a national funding agency. These three individuals had no trouble establishing the technical infrastructure required for collaboration. In a matter of days, a researcher created a website, Wiki, and discussion list for the group. While the technical infrastructure was readied with ease, the real challenges were yet to emerge. Each of the researchers only populated the website and the Wiki with information from past completed projects. This was a safe approach as there was no knowledge and information in these efforts that was considered highly proprietary or confidential (most of the items populated were electronic copies of past journal articles and PowerPoint files of conference presentations). As the three researchers started to invite colleagues to the network they ran into problems. The first problem was “who to invite”. Some of the names suggested by one of the researchers was not seen as credible or particularly of value by others. A decision was hence made to invite researchers that were agreed upon by all three. This debate was critical as it was the first time experiences, know-how, and deep arguments occurred. Once the invited members joined (the original goal was to have 25 members, however 3 declined), did a conference call take place to discuss governance rules of the networks and the projects that will be pursued. In particular, a decision was made that information and knowledge shared within the network could not be used for the personal gain of any member (Taylor, 2004; Rao, 2005). Members needed to consult with the entire network should they want to take common knowledge outside it for individual purposes. Rules were created for ensuring that members participated and task forces were formed. Monthly conference calls were arranged for the network, and each task force scheduled meetings as needed to make progress on research projects. Only after the initial call, did members start sharing deeper experiences, ideas, and know-how, collaboration began to intensify. All members In Proceedings of the SoftWars 07 Conference on Social, Organizational and Economic Impact of Information Technology October 18-19, 2007 , ISEG, Lisbon, Portugal
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Pg15-10 attested that the setting up of governance rules for the sharing of knowledge was a critical step to enable knowledge sharing to occur, and more importantly to lead to the cocreation of new knowledge. Conclusion This paper has presented findings from an exploratory investigation of a competitive knowledge network of automobile dealers. All of the findings presented, were found, albeit manifesting themselves in a different form, in the scientific collaboration network. Knowledge sharing in situations of an inactive, non competitive marketplace is readily achieved due to the obvious lack of vested business interests. It is of course the compounded complexity of facilitating such agreements in an environment of overt competitiveness that is difficult. The salient approach to formulating a web presence frequently involves the former but rarely the latter where there are clearly a number of significant challenges. There is in this respect a significant amount of literature reporting opportunities for a web presence in non-competitive situations but a scarcity of evidence and empirical foundations for an approach for knowledge sharing between ‘competitors’. The research in the paper has examined the context of automobile distributors faced with these demands and provided theoretical and empirical insights into their initiation and sustainability. Bibliography Adler, P S (2001) Market, Hierarchy, and Trust: The Knowledge Economy and the Future of Capitalism, Organization Science, v.12 n.2, p.215-234, March Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. (2001), Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective, Organization Science, 12 (2), 198-213. Cross, R., Davenport, T. & Cantrell, S. (2003). The Social Side of High Performance. Sloan Management Review. 45(1) pp. 20-24. Cross, R. & Prusak, L (2002). The People That Make Organizations Stop - Or Go. Harvard Business Review 80(6), pp. 104-112. Cross, R., Nohria, N. & Parker, A. (2002). Six Myths About Informal Networks --- And How To Overcome Them. Sloan Management Review 43 (3), pp. 67-76. Cummings, J.N. (2004), Work Groups, Structural Diversity, and Knowledge Sharing in a Global Organization, Management Science, 50, (3), March, 352-364. Davenport, T.H., Prusak, L. and Wilson, H.J. (2003), What's the Big Idea?, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, USA Desouza, K.C., (2003) Facilitating Tacit Knowledge Exchange, Communications of the ACM, 46, (6), 8798 Evermann, J. (2005) Towards a Cognitive Foundation for Knowledge Representation Information Systems Journal, 15 (2), 147-178 Friedman, V.J. (2002), The Individual as Agent of Organizational Learning, California Management Review, 44, (2), Winter, 70-89. Galaskiewicz, J. (1985) Interorganizational relations. Annual Review of Sociology, 11: 281-304 Grant, R. M., “Prospering in Dynamically-Competitive Environments: Organizational Capability as Knowledge Integration”, Organization Science, 7 (4), 1996, 375-387 Gilmour, D. (2003), How to Fix Knowledge Management, Harvard Business Review, October, 5, 126-134 Gulati, R., Nohria, N., & Zaheer, A. (2000) Strategic networks. Strategic Management Journal, 21: 203-215 Heaton, L. and Taylor, J.R. (2002), Knowledge Management and Professional Work, Management Communication Quarterly, 16, (2), Nov, 210-236. Ibrahim, R and Nissen, M E (2005) Developing a Knowledge-Based Organizational Performance Model for Discontinuous Participatory Enterprises. HICSS2005 (Hawaii) In Proceedings of the SoftWars 07 Conference on Social, Organizational and Economic Impact of Information Technology October 18-19, 2007 , ISEG, Lisbon, Portugal
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Pg15-11 Iverson, J.O. and McPhee, R.D. (2002), Knowledge Management in Communities of Practice, Management Communication Quarterly, 16, (2), November, 259-266. Kranton, R. E., & Minehart, D. F. (2000) Networks versus vertical integration. RAND Journal of Economics, 31(3): 570-601 Li, L (2002), Information Sharing in a Supply Chain with Horizontal Competition, Management Science, 48, (9), 1196-1212 McInerney, C. (2002), Knowledge Management and the Dynamic Nature of Knowledge, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53 (12), October, 1009-1018. Rao, M. (2005), Overview: The Social Life of Knowledge Management Tools, in Rao, M. (ed), Knowledge Management Tools and Techniques: Practitioners and Experts Evaluate Knowledge Management Solutions, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, UK Spender, J.C., “Making Knowledge the Basis of a Dynamic Theory of the Firm,” Strategic Management Journal, 17, Winter Special issue, 1996, 45-62. Southon, F.C.G., Todd, R.J. and Seneque, M. (2002), Knowledge Management in Three Organizations: An Exploratory Study, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 12, (53), October, 1047-1059. Siemieniuch, C. and Sinclair, M. (2004), A Framework for Organisational Readiness for Knowledge Management, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 24, (1), 79-98. Taylor, W.A. (2004), Computer-mediated Knowledge Sharing and Individual User Differences: an exploratory study, European Journal of Information Systems, 13, 52-64. Wasko, M., and Faraj, S. (2005). "Why Should I Share? Examining Knowledge Contribution in Electronic Networks of Practice," MIS Quarterly (29 (1), pp 1-23.
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