Introduction to HICCS-47 Minitrack: Knowledge Management for Innovation, Agility and Complexity Management

The fundamental role of knowledge for acquiring and maintaining competitive advantage emphasizes the need for effective and strategic KM in organizations. When effective and reliable methods drive approaches to KM, this in turn supports the integration of value-creating activities into organizational processes and increases an organization's potential to achieve innovation, agility and competitiveness. This minitrack focuses on the contributions of KM to supporting organizational innovation, agility and complexity management. As the global economic environment continues to pose challenges for organizations, a fundamental transformation of KM has been taking place across two dimensions. The first dimension includes exploring how the inflows and outflows of knowledge have developed and grown to accelerate internal innovation and expand the markets for the external use of innovation. The second dimension involves the ways in which KM is used to support organizational agility and sustain competitive advantage in complex business environments. Both of these themes explore the effectiveness of new methods and approaches for improving innovation and organizational agility and raise important new issues about the ways in which knowledge is created and applied to articulate new ideas, develop new products and solutions and generate business value. The paper by Heo and Lee highlights the importance of critical territory in the post-acquisition of knowledge boundaries in organizations. The preservation of a certain knowledge-bearing domain, called critical territory, is essential in post-acquisition integration, particularly for the target firm. Their study highlights that a lack of clear knowledge boundaries between the acquiring form and the target form can jeopardize knowledge integration as the new firm moves forward. Without the preservation of critical territory, post-acquisition knowledge integration hampers target firm KM activities and compromises maximum synergy generation, which is the goal of acquisition. The paper by Rodríguez, Díaz, Garbajosa, Pérez and Yagüe addresses the lack of mechanisms currently available to assist organizations in modeling their innovation knowledge and measuring their innovation capability. Empirically validated through a number of case studies, the authors present an Innovation Capability Framework that models innovation knowledge and assesses the innovation capability of organizations for guiding future innovation processes. Comprised of a conceptual model, a graphical modeling language, an innovation positioning system, and supported by an innovation modeling tool, the framework is applied to analyze the innovation capability of organizations. The paper by Yau, Yan and Dong explores the relationship between organizational learning and the development of organizational ambidexterity. Organizational ambidexterity, defineds as the simultaneous pursuit of both exploration and exploitation activities, is essential for organizations to thrive, survive and mature. Drawing on organizational learning theories, the authors investigate how two types of learning (strategic learning and business learning), and the interaction between them can contribute to the dynamic evolution of organizational ambidexterity through a longitudinal case study of a high-tech firm in China. Their study reveals that exploration and exploitation are distinct but also closely associated pursuits, and that organizational ambidexterity is accumulative and should be constructed across a range of organizational levels. Representative strategic and business learning activities and principles are also identified. The paper by Gloet and Samson examines the extent to which knowledge and innovation management practices contribute to innovation performance. A model of Systematic Innovation Capability consisting of various building blocks of innovation and linked to innovation performance and business success framed the study. A quantitative survey of 1,579 Australian managers was conducted to determine the extent to which various practices relating to systematic and sustained innovation were prevalent in the respondent organizations. The analysis of the data revealed the major predictors of innovation performance. The relationship between innovation performance and business performance across the respondent organizations is also explored. 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Science