Knowledge integration-the purposeful combination of specialized and complementary knowledge to achieve specific tasks-is increasingly important for organizations. This book offers a consistent set of ideas, methods and tools useful to interpret, analyze and act upon the processes of knowledge integration across organizational and other boundaries.

Technology-based firms continue to compete primarily on innovation, and one continuously required to present new solutions to an exacting market. As technological complexity and specialization intensifies, firms increasingly need to integrate and co-ordinate knowledge by means of project groups, diversified organizations, inter-organizational partnerships, and strategic alliances. Innovation processes have progressively become interdisciplinary, collaborative, inter-organizational, and international, and a firm's ability to synthesize knowledge across disciplines, organizations, and geographical locations has a major influence on its viability and success. This book demonstrates how knowledge integration is crucial in facilitating innovation within modern firms. This book provides original, detailed empirical studies of prerequisites, mechanisms, and outcomes of knowledge integration processes on several organizational levels, from key individuals, projects, and internal organizations, to collaboration between firms. It stresses the need to understand knowledge integration as a multi-level phenomenon, which requires a broad repertoire of organizational and technical means. It further clarifies the need for strong internal capabilities for exploiting external knowledge, reveals how costs of knowledge integration affect outcomes and strategic decisions, and discusses the managerial implications of fostering knowledge integration, providing practical guidance and support for managers of knowledge integration in high technology enterprises.

This edited book addresses two critical issues in international management: building trust and managing boundary spanning activities between international business partners. The duel-process of internationalization of multinational corporations (MNCs), through globalisation and regionalisation, has helped MNCs to increase their market expansion and improve the capabilities of innovation and learning. By creating various forms of international strategic alliances (ISAs), MNCs have become structurally more complex and geographically more dispersed. As a result, MNCs in general and ISAs in particular face the challenges of discerning blurred organisational boundaries, reconfiguring the control mechanisms, integrating diversified resources, and coordinating distributed activities in time and space. Research in organisation behaviour indicates that boundary spanners play critical yet unspecified roles and functions in managing cross-boundary relationships. A core boundary spanning function is to build trust relationships. When organisations engage in business transactions, members of the organisations are concerned with not only the outcomes of economic transactions but also the processes of social exchanges. Boundary spanners may succeed in building interpersonal trust in a partnership, nonetheless their effort may not lead to inter-partner trust without an effective implementation of the institutionalisation process. Whereas trustworthiness is the antecedent to trust providing the basis for trust to develop, distrust manifests itself as a separate and linked concept to trust. These dynamic features of trust, trustworthiness, and distrust are critically elaborated. Trust Building and Boundary Spanning in Cross-Border Management is dedicated to explicating these under-researched themes and contributing to the emerging streams of research in micro foundations and micro-structural approaches. It illustrates the latest research on the topic and will be of interest to both students at an advanced level, academics and reflective practitioners in the fields of organisational behaviour and theory, strategic management, international strategy and strategic alliances.

Innovation requires teaming. (Put another way, teaming is to innovation what assembly lines are to car production.) This book brings together key insights on teaming, as they pertain to innovation. How do you build a culture of innovation? What does that culture look like? How does it evolve and grow? How are teams most effectively created and then nurtured in this context? What is a leader's role in this culture? This little book is a roadmap for teaming to innovate. We describe five necessary steps along that road: Aim High, Team Up, Fail Well, Learn Fast, and Repeat. This path is not smooth. To illustrate each critical step, we look at real-life scenarios that show how teaming to innovate provides the spark that can fertilize creativity, clarify goals, and redefine the meaning of leadership.

Closing the circle : employing a new method of internet resources classification, cataloging and naming for managing the first Russian social knowledge network / Dmitry Peskov, Vitaly Kabernik and Andrei Mikheyev. Developing a human behavioral model for collaborative e-service system designs / Michael S. Nilan, Chingning Wang and Jack Powers. Exploring knowledge management and knowledge transfer in a non-profit human service organization / Kim Stauss and Chan M. Hellman. IC creation mechanism based on epistemological and ontological perspectives / Li Ping and Liu Xisong. The usefulness of weblog genre analysis in ICT-driven knowledge management practice : a social construction of technology perspective / Ji-Hong Park. Practical approach to KM implementation : industrial case of Slovenian company Gorenje D.D. / Peter Baloh, Alesa Sasa Sitar and Vasilije Vasic. Data mining : an overview of the concept & benefits - a primer / Leila A. Halawi, Jay E. Aronson and Richard V. McCarthy. Some conceptual modeling issues in FRBR / Allen Renear and Yunseon Choi. An exploratory study of the information culture of city government support staff in relation to managerial decision-making / Patricia F. Katopol. Product knowledge reasoning : a DL-based approach / Nizamuddin Channa, Shanping Li and Xiangjun Fu. Understanding foreign markets through cooperative agreements : a multi-level strategic, intellectual, and social capital perspective / Francis J. Barciak III, Michael Harington and Alia Bashir. The structure of impact factor of academic journals in the field of education and educational psychology : citations coming from articles published by their editorial board members / Juan Miguel Campanario, Lidia Gonzalez and Cristina Rodriguez. Effects of personal factors on knowledge sharing among informaion systems team members / Jafar Ali and Bassam Hasan. Intellectual capital reports in higher education and research / Richard Pircher and Hanna Risku

This book considers the concept of strategic community, a framework that integrates knowledge possessed by people, groups or organizations across boundaries. Case studies demonstrate how strategy, organization and leadership in corporations, represent the dynamic view of strategy necessary to obtain competitive organizational capability.

Written by a team of highly respected authorities on management and organizational behaviour, this core textbook is grounded in an extensive body of international research and analysis that demonstrates that knowledge work depends primarily on the behaviours, attitudes and motivations of those who undertake and manage it and not simply on the implementation of information systems technology. Throughout the book, engaging case studies and role plays demonstrate the range of perspectives that can be applied to knowledge work, and the organisational conditions under which it can be managed effectively. This book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students on modules covering Knowledge Management, and ideal for modules in Human Resource Management and Organisational Studies. New to this Edition: - Updated case studies based on the latest research and with international reach - Enhanced learning and teaching tools to help students understand important concepts - A new companion website with lecturer resources