Governing Knowledge Processes

The objective of this special issue is to contribute to the understanding of Knowledge Governance in the Mulitnational Corporation. Like the traditional literature on corporate governance the authors are concerned with the attraction of crucial capital, its efficient allocation, as well as the mechanism used to achieve capital accumulation and optimal utilization. Knowledge as a particular sort of capital is seen as increasingly crucial to the existence, boundaries, and economic organization of modern Multinational Corporation.

An under-researched issue in work within the "knowledge movement" is the relation between organizational issues and knowledge processes (i.e., sharing and creating knowledge). We argue that managers can shape formal organization structure and organization forms and can influence the more informal organizational practices in order to foster knowledge sharing and creation. Theoretically, we unfold this argument by relying on key ideas of organizational economics and organizational behaviour studies. We put forward a number of refutable propositions derived from this reasoning. Acknowledgments We are grateful to Anna Grandori for numerous excellent comments on an earlier draft. The standard disclaimer applies. Keywords: Knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, governance, organizational economics, organizational behavior.

The book argues that knowledge governance is a distinct issue in management and organization because knowledge processes differ on several dimensions from routine and more traditional processes.

Today Learning Organizations are shaped by collective knowledge and the existence of teams and groups of people that are continuously developing their capacity and ability to create results. Knowledge-based organizations understand the importance of continually learning at all levels and facilitate learning for their members through empowering people, encouraging collaboration, and promoting open dialogue. Organizational management issues have become strategic and fundamental in the collection and sharing of data and information and are recognized as challenging to both public and private organizations around the world. This has created the need to knowledge governance mechanisms to support Knowledge Management practices in organizations.For this governance, the mechanisms and procedures that encompass Knowledge Management, advancing beyond the traditional Corporate Governance (CorpGov) model, have been consolidated into a new governance model described as Knowledge Governance (KGov). Such model considers the processes of the knowledge related to the use, creation, retention, integration and sharing. In order to implement governance, it is essential to develop competencies and establish corporate policies and structures focusing on respect for common interests and collective goals. In this context, mechanisms must be created for the creation, sharing, storage and transfer of knowledge, making changes happen in synergy and adding value to the organization as a whole.The book covers the newly emerging area of knowledge governance and Learning Organizations and expands our understanding of Learning Organizations and their ability to acquire, create and share knowledge while continually examining organizational behavioral issues affecting their productivity.

"Knowledge commons" describes the institutionalized community governance of the sharing and, in some cases, creation, of information, science, knowledge, data, and other types of intellectual and cultural resources. It is the subject of enormous recent interest and enthusiasm with respect to policymaking about innovation, creative production, and intellectual property. Taking that enthusiasm as its starting point, Governing Knowledge Commons argues that policymaking should be based on evidence and a deeper understanding of what makes commons institutions work. It offers a systematic way to study knowledge commons, borrowing and building on Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize-winning research on natural resource commons. It proposes a framework for studying knowledge commons that is adapted to the unique attributes of knowledge and information, describing the framework in detail and explaining how to put it into context both with respect to commons research and with respect to innovation and information policy. Eleven detailed case studies apply and discuss the framework exploring knowledge commons across a wide variety of scientific and cultural domains.

This book contributes to the understanding of Knowledge Governance in the Multinational Corporation. Intra-firm and inter-firm processes of knowledge creation, sharing and exploitation have attracted increasingly managerial and scholarly interest. However the relation between particular knowledge processes, determinants of organizational choices, governance mechanisms, their relevant costs and benefits, and associated strategic advantages remain less well understood. To address these challenges, this book gives answers to the following questions. What are key challenges of governing knowledge in the multinational corporation? How do contingencies influence relevant trade-offs? How do sets of governance mechanisms respond to problems of cognition and incentives?

While there are many books on knowledge management, knowledge governance is a concept that has not been so well explored, and is much less understood. Knowledge governance refers to choosing structures and mechanisms that can influence the processes of sharing and creating knowledge. The book argues that knowledge governance is a distinct issue in management and organization because knowledge processes differ on several dimensions from routine and more traditional processes. The relationship between governance issues and knowledge processes is under-researched, theoretically as well as empirically. Thematically, knowledge governance cuts across fields such as general management, human resource management, the management of intellectual capital, innovation theory, strategic management, technology strategy, and international business. Not surprisingly, existing ideas are developed from the perspectives of different fields and from different underlying disciplinary foundations; however, it often remains unclear how these ideas relate together and how they differ in terms of unit of analysis, mode of analysis, underlying logic and assumptions, etc. This book is an important step towards overcoming the existing fragmentation in the field by providing a multi-disciplinary collection of chapters on knowledge governance. While the single chapters accentuate the pluralism in the field, they all examine issues that constitute the essence of knowledge governance.

This dissertation explains why there persists a divergence of academia-industry-government inter-linkage in the Indonesian science system. This divergence constrains the capacity of the science system in localizing knowledge from the supply chain linkage and demonstrates the centralized character of the Indonesian science system. Additionally, the book shows that the Jababeka Industrial Cluster is shaped by the supply chain linkage and, thus, lacks the capacity of a knowledge cluster. Therefore, horizontal collaboration between academia-industry is restricted and limited. Dissertation. (Series: ZEF Development Studies - Vol. 27)