Collective Knowledge and Organizational Routines within Academic Communities of Practice: an Empirical Research on Science–Entrepreneurs

Abstract

The management of knowledge is increasingly considered as a main source of competitive advantage for corporations. It is argued that organizations enjoy a competitive advantage if they know how to expand, disseminate, and exploit organizational knowledge internally. Moreover, organizations can achieve their strategic goals by encouraging knowledge sharing, flexibility, and adaptation to change. Furthermore, our position is that tacit knowledge sharing can lead to knowledge stratification. And that it is likely to lead to encode knowledge in behavioral schemas, apparently similar to organizational routines, but as a matter of fact more complex and refined: the cognitive scripts. Even if apparently similar to organizational routines, the scripts strongly differ from them in terms of power of replication, inertia degree, and search potential. The present study focuses on the analysis of the script localization in the organization as an important starting point for the understanding of the dynamics of knowledge stratification and encoding. Thus, hypothesizing kinds of knowledge reuse within spin-off decisions as well. The plausibility of the mentioned hypotheses is tested by a multivariate statistics approach.