Options
2017
Conference Paper
Titel
The chicken or the egg: The relationship between knowledge and business model innovation
Abstract
A firm's intellectual capital (IC) is a key resource of organizational creativity and innovativeness whereas knowledge management (KM) comprises organizational and managerial processes and practices that are implemented to leverage IC to innovate and create competitive advantage. Previous research has provided a basic understanding on the relationship between IC, KM and corporate innovativeness as well as performance, but several research gaps still remain. One of the identified gaps is the lack of understanding related to the association between IC, KM and business model innovation (BMI). While this identified gap remains, managers are left without solid understanding and efficient tools to leverage the firm's IC to create competitive advantage through BMI. Previous research has initially identified the main streams that deal with the relationship of IC and BMI and provided an overview on these as well as some major issues that should be addressed by future research in this context (Steinhöfel and Inkinen, 2016). Since KM and IC are closely linked and the importance of KM for corporate innovativeness and competitiveness is acknowledged widely, the consideration of this additional concept in the light of the before mentioned relationship of BMI and IC appears to be promising. Building on this previous research this study expands the scope of the latter contribution by including extant literature that simultaneously addresses the concepts of KM and BMI. This study identifies the findings on the relationship of KM and BMI within extant literature. By combining these with the findings of the previous study on the relationship between IC and BMI, the objective of this study is to provide academics and managers with a framework that combines the specific qualities of IC (e.g. intangibility, social embeddedness), management activities that are tailored to leverage IC (i.e. KM) and several steps of the BMI process to create and capture value.