Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

The Stage of Organizational Innovation and Informal Knowledge

The previous section highlighted the fact that knowledge from informal external sources drawn from various social communities can play an important role in organizational innovation. However, effectively utilizing this knowledge is not without its challenges. We suggest here, that organizational learning from external and informal sources can be seen to have three distinct stages. The first stage involves the firm (or its employees) scanning the environment as it searches for informal knowledge useful to managerial, technological, or organizational innovation. Thus, the first stage is concerned solely with identifying potentially useful knowledge. Once the sources of potentially useful knowledge have been identified, the next challenge is to access and transfer this knowledge from the external constituent to the firm. It is in the second stage of transfer that knowledge actually crosses firm boundaries, and is brought in to the firm and becomes a part of the firm’s internal knowledge stock. Finally, the organization must integrate the transferred knowledge with its internal knowledge to utilize it effectively and create value. In this last stage, we are concerned with the recombination of knowledge within firm boundaries that results in innovation. Given that informal sources of knowledge are important for organizations, yet varied and sometimes hard to identify, we examine the implications of this on each of the steps ...