Introduction to the Dissertation

Collective knowledge, and the associated concepts of collectively learning, remembering, and inventing, are increasingly important when it comes to understanding today’s economy and society. Many argue that an organization’s knowledge-related capabilities are the main source of its competitive advantage (e.g., Kogut & Zander, 1992; Prahalad & Hamel, 1990) and that organizations exist primarily to function as a coordination mechanism to process and integrate the specialist knowledge of its members (Grant, 1996). There is a long-standing discussion of the challenge inherent in the idea that the knowledge that we need to use “never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess” (Hayek, 1945: 519).