Protecting organizational competitive advantage: A knowledge leakage perspective

Abstract

The strategic management literature emphasizes the importance of protecting organizational knowledge and information, especially in terms of maintaining competitive advantage. We synthesized several mechanisms from the literature that organizations could deploy to protect their knowledge and information. An Australian field study investigated how and to what extent these mechanisms were deployed in 11 knowledge-intensive organizations. The study revealed surprising findings: firstly, there was no evidence of a systematic and comprehensive management approach to the identification and protection of knowledge assets. Approaches were often haphazard, driven in a bottom-up fashion with much of t..