Top executives increasingly see the competitive advantage of their firms coming from their ability to exploit knowledge and learning. Policy-makers likewise see the fate of national and regional economies being determined by the emergence of a knowledge economy.
These views place great importance on the way in which knowledge evolves within business. However, to date, our understanding of that evolution has been limited by a tendency to see knowledge as simply a resource or input to be transformed into outputs. This R&D-centred view of business knowledge has recently been challenged by...