Knowledge Sharing in the Industrial Milieu

Abstract

Despite the recent massive reduction in communication costs, and the talk of virtual organisations, the empirical evidence shows that geographically clustered companies are more innovative. This paper highlights the possible reasons for this by focusing on the knowledge sharing problems that reside within the networks between companies. It draws on the evolutionary economics perspective of innovation, which includes an understanding of the learning process that occurs in the industrial milieu or atmosphere between companies and how they share tacit core competencies. This milieu enables tacit to tacit knowledge sharing to operate in that wicked problem domain that arises when a specific product development or process improvement problem has not even been defined. It is an important topic, and one that needs some management, not only because this milieu appears to be the main source of innovation, but also because it underlines some of the complexities of tacit knowledge management.