Developing A Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Knowledge is considered as one of the most important and competitive resource for sustenance of the organisation (Zack, 1999). It can be compared to the strategic resource that can be used and applied in various frames of the organisation. Experienced managers in the organisations believe that company can receive strategic advantage through knowledge and not the strategies or actions implemented by competitors. Knowledge can be regarded as a strong approach that opens numerous ways of success. It is that weapon that help organisation to evaluate solutions in financial and other professional difficulties.

Businesses continually adapt to a changing environment to maintain their market position (Appelbaum, Habashy, Malo, & Shafiq, 2012; Biedenbacha & Soumlderholma, 2008). Change is inevitable considering the current rate of technological advancement and the growth in global competition (Appelbaum et al., 2012; Armenakis & Harris, 2009; By, 2007). Increasing competition and the need for strategic flexibility and globalization is affecting almost every organization today, regardless of size, market, focus, and so on (Jaros, 2010).

To get sustainable competitive advantage, the significant role of knowledge management has been explored. Knowledge management causes companies’ core competencies to become stronger. Therefore, competitive advantage has been more sustainable. Knowledge management is perceived as the development of organizing the intangible asset of a firm. The economic and production level of a company relies more on its brainpower, human capital and invisible competences than its physical assets. The function of each business relies upon the knowledge of its human capital.

As a set of business activities that add value to goods and services sold to consumers, retailing involves key strategies in order to build a sustainable, competitive advantage for companies (Peterson & Balasubramanian, 2002). These strategies involve identifying a retailer’s target market and satisfying those needs. Through observing the retail strategy used by the company T2, this essay will ascertain and analyse their retail mix in order to determine the competitive advantage T2 has and whether it is sustainable or not.

(Clarke, 2008) Illustrates how knowledge management can be used by firms and the scope and methods that are used for knowledge management which can help knowledge managers create a KM system which fosters innovation. It also provides us with various perspectives on the management of knowledge and about the KM in different organizations as a critical thinking system. The researchers of the paper say that Knowledge Management is not just explicit, it is not about just recording the explicit knowledge or cannot be achieved by manipulating that knowledge but it must be rather implicit from which the firm can benefit in the long run. So the process of knowledge management is equally important as the content.

Knowledge management (KM) is a relatively new concept that emerged 15 or 20 years ago and which presents knowledge as a process, rather as something that people have. Blacker (1995) himself talks of “knowing as a process”, thus something far more complex and ambiguous than the classical and cognitive views that we could have of knowledge. Moreover, this assumption implies, as we shall see, that management is not neutral or objective but that it is intertwined in power relations and social processes that help to achieve the KM’s goals

The term knowledge management has become common in businesses throughout the world. Despite its increased prevalence, there remains a large degree of confusion concerning the applied definition of what knowledge management is. Within the knowledge management community, attempts at defining this elusive term appear to be in constant flux. However, a basic description of what constitutes

Knowledge management helps to solve some of the most common business problems and at the same time delivers

Knowledge management is a term and a concept which began in the early 1990s. Despite the popular notion that knowledge management only began as a practice with the rise of technology, it has been around as a concept for around 15,000 years. At that time in history, merchants, artisans, doctors, and others first began writing down their knowledge for future generations. In Mesopotamia, roughly 5,000 years ago, people began to have difficulty keeping track of all the clay tablets on which information was written and created the first organized knowledge management solutions, the library (Bergeron 2003). Over the years, even as human advanced technologically, the idea of knowledge management remained. Since the idea of knowledge management arose as a management idea in the 1990s, it has undergone several changes in definition as ideas have changed. First, in 1994, it was defined as “the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge.” While this was a very straight forward definition, it had the disadvantage of not including any mention of the human element. Thus, in 1998, the definition was changed to be “a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets, which may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.” Finally, as technology has created more of an element of

This report analyses the importance of knowledge management in the organisational context for maintaining competitive edge in the market. It conducts an analysis of the key areas in knowledge management with effective implementation of the different strategies for efficient knowledge management and knowledge transfer within the different levels of management in an organisation, these have been elaborated.

Knowledge Management is defined as the process of capturing, distributing and effectively using knowledge (Davenport, 1994) 1. It can also be refer as a multi-disciplined method in order to accomplish organizational objectives by fully utilized and generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets 6. Knowledge Management focuses on the gaining, creating, and sharing knowledge and technical foundations that support them 2. According to Grey, knowledge management is an audit of “intellectual assets” that highlights unique resources, critical functions and potential deadlocks which prevent knowledge flows to the point of use. It protects intellectual assets from decaying, seeks opportunities to improve decisions, services and products through adding intelligence, increasing value and providing flexibility (Grey , n.d) 5. On top of that, knowledge management includes a range of planning and practices used in an organization to classify, create, distribute and enable adoption of intuitions and experiences.

Knowledge Management is an organization’s methodology of making their intellectual assets as fully functional, or effective as possible. This is a systematic approach organized to enhance understanding. It’s the managing of information in a way that provides an organization with a competitive advantage.

The process of collecting, transferring, storing and making information useful is also known as knowledge management. In this, the organization is enabled to grow, adapt to changes and meet customer demands. The information age has a most certain influence on how the organization manages knowledge. This is true of whether that knowledge is unique to the organization, or shared to external organizations. Today there are various ways to collect and compile data and turn that data into useful information; however, without the use of knowledge management, then data, information, and knowledge is lost or misused. Through the knowledge management process the organization has the ability to learn as an organization. This is

In today’s modern day environment, the competition as well as the drive to be one of the best amongst organizations, is consistently increasing, especially after globalization. Due to which many organizations are no longer confined under certain boundaries, but instead are more intermingled. As an outcome, many organizations these days heavily rely on each other for sharing knowledge. Therefore, knowledge management is considered as a valuable component towards the success of an organization.

Knowledge management is a large term and can mean a number of things. For the purpose of this paper, the definition of knowledge management that I will recognize is the creation, development, and sharing of knowledge and information within an organization. However the problem remains, as well as the topic of this paper, exactly how effective is knowledge management in an organization. Furthermore, the key question that I hope to answer in this paper is how the use and development of knowledge can be managed in an organization. Although there are countless pieces of literature on knowledge management itself, and there have been proposals that link knowledge management to a company’s performance, to this date there are very few papers that attempt to measure the effectiveness of knowledge management within an organization. Overall, my objective of this paper is to compare two separate companies and first, find out how to measure the value of knowledge management, and second, find out how beneficial it is to the organization.