Monday
Building on the success of previous Conferences at the Universities of Warwick (2000) and Leicester (2001), and the conference on Organizational Knowledge, Learning and Capabilities (OKLC 2002) organized by ALBA last April, OKLC 2003 will take place in Barcelona on April 13th and 14th, 2003, organized by the IESE Business School, University of Navarra.
The conference will maintain its focus, with an emphasis on seeing organizations as knowledge systems --bundles of knowledge assets with significant social and organizational dynamics, the effective management of which may be a source of a firm's sustainable competitive advantage. The main objective of this iteration is to consolidate the achievements of previous conferences, giving participants an opportunity to engage in fruitful interchanges of ideas in a relaxed, congenial and creative context. For this reason one goal is to keep the conference relatively small both in the number of participants and in the number of simultaneous tracks.
Knowledge has always been an organizational asset. However, with organizations increasingly exposed to global competition many argue that knowledge has become the most critical asset for organizations. Thus, it becomes essential to understand how to develop knowledge through effective learning at the individual, group and organization level, how to improve approaches to knowledge transfer, and how to realize effective knowledge deployment.
Viewing organizations as knowledge systems has turned out to be a very fruitful avenue for research. If an organization is a collection of knowledge assets then the refinement, updating and management of those assets is of great importance. Hence the current emphasis on attempts to understanding knowledge creation, transmission, storage and retrieval, as well as to improve our understanding of how organizational memory and learning function. Since knowledge is so important, the manner in which organizations remember what they know and learn from their (as well as from others') experience is also important, both theoretically and practically. Moreover, since knowledge assets are so central to the functioning of firms, the ways in which companies develop and sustain certain knowledge-based capabilities in order to gain and sustain competitive advantage is an interesting research topic.
The knowledge-based view of organizations is transdisciplinary by nature, and consequently it provides the means for integrating insights from a variety of disciplines, making this area of research particularly appealing. In this conference we seek papers (conceptual, empirical, or both) from scholars from all related fields that address one, or any combinations of, the following questions (the list is not meant to be exhaustive):
1. How is organizational knowledge and its management to be conceptualized and researched?
2. How is organizational knowledge produced, used, renewed, stored, retrieved, transmitted, and shared? How is