Special Issue on Information Technology and Knowledge Management

Knowledge is a fundamental asset for firms in the contemporary economy. Increasingly, knowledge is distributed across individuals, teams, and organizations. Therefore, the ability to create, acquire, integrate, and deploy distributed knowledge has emerged as a fundamental organizational capability (Takeishi 2001; Teece 1997). To be successful , firms must not only exploit their existing knowledge, but must also invest in continually exploring new knowledge as strategic options for future strategies and competitive advantage (Sambamurthy et al. 2003). The centrality of knowledge in firms is reflected in the emergence of the knowledge-based view (Conner and Prahalad 1996) as an important theoretical stance in contemporary organizational research. Theoretical proposals indicate that advantages for a firm arise from cooperative social contexts that are conducive to the creation, coordination , transfer, and integration of knowledge distributed among its employees, business units, and business partners (Ghoshal and Moran 1996). Others have suggested that the sources of competitive advantage have migrated from being based on economies of scale to being based on economies of expertise that are derived by leveraging knowledge distributed in the organi-zation's network through intra-organizational and interorganizational relationships (Subramani and Venkatraman 2003). Knowledge is a complex concept and a number of factors determine the nature of knowledge creation, management, valuation, and sharing (Nonaka 1994). Drawing from prior discussions, we distinguish knowledge from data and information and view knowledge as a " fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information and expert insight that provide[s] a framework for evaluation and incorporating new experiences and information " (Davenport and Prusak 1997, p. 5). Knowledge can be either tacit or explicit; this attribute is also expressed as the distinction between knowing and knowledge (Brown and Duguid 1998; Cook and Brown 1999). Tacit knowledge refers to knowledge that has a personal quality that makes it hard to articulate or communicate or analogously , the knowing or the deeply rooted know-how that emerges from action in a particular context. In contrast, explicit knowledge refers to the codifiable component that can be disembodied and transmitted, a notion analogous to knowledge, the know-what that can be extracted from the knowledge holder and shared with other individuals. Further, knowledge can be conceived as existing