Making Organisational Memory Perform

The literature on the impact of organisational memory on performance in terms of innovation is ambiguous. For example, on one hand organisational memory is recognised as a source of organisational inertia and restricts the range of innovative options. On the other hand, it is argued that innovation can be greatly facilitated by an organisation's ability to retain, evaluate and utilise existing knowledge. These contradictory findings are partly due to the lack of conceptualisation and effective measurement of organisational memory. This paper identifies the underlying factors that affect organisational memory, namely organisational memory (OM) storage, OM flow, OM context, and OM creative combination, which are the integral parts of the organisational memory performance model. The practical implication is that building a large knowledge repository is not a simple task. Companies need to promote a culture of knowledge sharing and learning in order to operate effective organisational memory systems.

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