Diffusion and appropriation of knowlegde in different organizational structures

GABRIEL YOGUEL; ANALÍA ERBES; VERÓNICA ROBERT; JOSÉ BORELLO

Technology Governance and Economic Dynamics

The other cannon foundation - Tallinn University of Technology

Lugar: Tallin; Año: 2007 p. 1 - 33

The objective of this paper is to discuss the connection between knowledgediffusion and appropriation as construction of competitive advantages in differentkinds of organizational structures. The main hypothesis is that theinverse relationship between diffusion and appropriation depends stronglyon the simultaneous interaction of technological specificities, knowledgemanagement, and prevailing market structures. We believe that the creationof competitive advantages rests on the development of agents’ cognitivecapacities, which enable them to appropriate a larger portion of the knowledgethey generate in terms of quasi-rents. As a consequence, the developmentof these cognitive capacities allows the management of tacit andcodified knowledge and acts as a barrier to decodification, thus raising theminimum thresholds needed for its appropriation and as such restricting theentrance of new firms.The first section proposes a taxonomy of firms based on the relative importancegiven to knowledge as a source of competitive advantages on differentorganizational forms of production. There will be an evaluation of eachtype in terms of technology and knowledge management and market structure.The presentation and discussion of the taxonomy makes it possible toexplore two central ideas of this paper: the existence of different logicsbetween tacit and codified knowledge, on the one hand, and the idea thatnot only must technology be considered from the perspective of certain sectoralspecificities (as elements of coherence within each sector), but alsofrom the perspectives of knowledge and competition, on the other. The secondsection analyzes the connections between knowledge diffusion andappropriation as a result of the simultaneous interplay amongst the threeregimes. Finally, the third section draws the conclusions and presents somepolicy recommendations.