A competence perspective on strategic learning and knowledge management

The growing prominence of accelerating change in the environments of organizations has brought processes for managing change within firms into the forefront of concerns in strategic management. As competition between firms increasingly takes on the character of a contest to identify, create, and leverage new competences (Hamel and Heene, 1994; Heene and Sanchez, 1996; Sanchez, Heene and Thomas, 1996a), effecting significant organizational change increasingly requires changing both the knowledge base within a firm and the way the firm uses its existing knowledge to compete more effectively. Consequently, improving a firm's strategic flexibility (Sanchez, 1993, 1995; Sanchez and Heene, 1996) to create new competences in response to environmental change is likely to require rethinking the ways a firm can create and acquire new knowledge and may require entirely new concepts for applying new knowledge to greatest strategic effect.