Tacit Knowledge Transfer Method And Influencing Factors Of Knowledge-intensive Industrial Enterprises

The notion that knowledge is the most important resource in firm growth and economic competitiveness is widely acknowledged. As an important element in the concept of knowledge, tacit knowledge has become recognized as playing a key role for companies to obtain sustainable advantage in the market. Besides, faced with the globalization of economy and severe competition, companies should not only create, share and sustain tacit knowledge within the organizational structure; they also have to acquire tacit knowledge from outside the firm, because this can help the company to respond much more efficiently to the technological development and customer demand. However, as to inter-firm tacit knowledge transfer, much more research efforts are still required to be made to gain further inside looks into it from both practitioners and academic researchers.The purpose of the present study is to provide an organizational level analysis with the aim to investigate tacit knowledge transfer in knowledge-intensive industry. We have identified three kinds of enterprise external relationships, which are relationships with collaborators, competitors and customers, and discussed tacit knowledge transfer behaviors in these relationships. Three questions to resolve compose the main content of this thesis. The first is to explore the channels and methods undertaken to realize inter-firm tacit knowledge. The second is to compare the similarity and difference of channels and methods used among different enterprise external relationships. And the third is to find the factors that affect tacit knowledge transfer.Generally, the main conclusions include: (1) Face-to-face formal and informal interactions are the two main channels in tacit knowledge transfer between firms with their collaborators and customers, otherwise, competitors transfer tacit knowledge most frequently by observing or studying the other's behaviors and employing related staff. (2) There are outstanding differences in the channels of tacit knowledge transfer between collaborators and competitors; however, no remarkable difference in tacit knowledge transfer channel usage has been found between the relationships with collaborators and customers. (3) Knowledge tacitness, knowledge management strategy and absorptive ability, trust, interaction degree and prior experience have outstanding effects on tacit knowledge transfer in all the three enterprise external relationships; knowledge background similarity shows effects in transferring collaborators and competitors' tacit knowledge with no effects for the customers'; relationship strategy and collaborate level, tacit knowledge transfer benefits, customer type are the factors that affect company's tacit knowledge transfer with their collaborators, competitors and customers respectively.