A Study On The Process And Generative Mechanisms Of Knowledge Creation In Business Cooperative Innovation

In today’s dynamic world, knowledge creation and knowledge management are considered essential foundation for an organization to retain competitive advantage. The existing literature mostly focuses on a pure organizational setting and its knowledge creation, and rarely investigates how knowledge has been created in an interorganizational setting. Due to the importance of knowledge creation and the gap of literature, this study aims to conduct a research on knowledge creation occurring in collaborative projects in an interorganizational setting. It is expected to find out a pattern in a collaborative knowledge creation process. The research is of help to extend understanding of how knowledge is created and who has done that; accordingly brings forth more effective collaboration and much more innovation out of collaboration.Based on Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) model of organizational knowledge creation, the study has analyzed knowledge creation of new technology in collaborative projects by applying case study and hierarchical regression analysis. The research data concerning qualitative and quantitative analysis are from the Administrative Committee of Tianjing Freightage Transport District. Six cases of collaborative projects were conducted to define every aspect in the management of the projects towards technological innovation. A survey was also conducted to study the relationship of factors to knowledge creation. By means of a quasi-natural experimental design, twenty-one projects were divided into high, medium, and low knowledge creation groups and the high and low groups then compared.The results show that intention and requisite variety of different participants are highly associated with knowledge creation. Moreover, projects in which goals were extremely specific and where management paid greater attention to environmental factors had greater levels of knowledge creation. Contrary to previous study, creative tension (positive), redundancy, and autonomy were not found significantly positive.The research confirms that the management of knowledge creation in interorganizational settings differs that in pure organizational settings. It is safe to conclude that an organizational knowledge creation theory is contingent on the particular setting. Theoretical and managerial implications are also discussed on the successful management of collaborative projects.