Replication of Organizational Routines: Conceptualizing the Exploitation of Knowledge Assets

Abstract

Abstract The fundamental problem of improving knowledge utilization in organizational settings continues to attract considerable attention. This interest manifests itself under such rubrics as organizational learning (Argote 1999, Garvin and Oliver 2000), knowledge sharing (Hansen 1999, Dixon 2000), internal transfer of knowledge and best practices (O’Dell et al. 1998), and closing the knowing-doing gap (Pfeffer and Sutton 2000). It would appear that interest in leveraging knowledge assets outstrips the ability to achieve results in that domain. For example, a recent survey of 431 U.S. and European organizations conducted by Ernst & Young shows that only 14% of the respondents judged satisfactory the performance of their organization in transferring existing knowledge internally (Ruggles 1998). There seems to be ample room for improvement. Organizations can learn from experience how to exploit knowledge assets. Such learning is generally more effective when selected key aspects of the exploitation effort are varied while the rest is kept constant or comparable. This way, causal explanations of success or failure in explaiting organizational knowledge can be rigorously assessed. For such quasi-experimental conditions to occur in a real-life setting, there must be numerous attempts to exploit knowledge, for example, to transfer best practices, attempts that are comparable in all but those aspects that are being manipulated, which means that such efforts must be simultaneous or adjacent in time if they are to remain comparable. Such conditions are rare, especially when each attempt is in and of itself a large-scale effort.