A situational approach to conduct a risk assessment of know-how drainage with regard to organizational complexity

Know-how drainage contains multiple dimensions: employees fluctuation, uncontrolled information exchange with suppliers and customers, intentional attacks from competitors, reverse engineering etc. In order to help organizations to determine the actual risk level a situational approach to measure the actual risk level of know-how drainage will be proposed. In a first step an assessment of organizational complexity will be carried out. Based on this result the adequate scope of assessment criteria will be chosen in order to carry out the risk assessment. By using this situational model the level of know-how risk drainage will be determined properly. Subsequently, appropriate counter-measures can be derived in order to minimize the risk level.