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Volume 4 Issue 2 April 2006
Balancing the Flows: Managing the Intellectual Capital Flows in Inter-Organisational Projects
Maria Solitander
Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration, Helsinki, Finland
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This paper analyzes different strategies for protecting knowledge in interorganisational collaborative relationships, based on intellectual capital (IC) theory. Previous research has stressed the need for the flows between structural, human and relational capital to function well. Firms involved in interorganisational collaborative relationships need to be able to manage the IC flows to enable the communication to run smoothly, while simultaneously limiting involuntary leakage of strategically important knowledge. The paper examines the strategies aimed at keeping the balance between sharing and protecting knowledge identified in a firm with extensive experience of close collaboration with partners that are partly also competitors. The empirical study is conducted in a multinational engineering consultancy. Seven different strategies for managing the flows between the structural and relational capital are identified in the empirical study. A further seven strategies are identified for managing the flows between human and relational capital. Finally, the risks occurring in interorganisational collaborative relationships are discussed in relation to the identified strategies, in order to analyze which risks can be diminished by the implementation of which protective strategy.
Keywords:
capital, protection of knowledge, interorganisational collaboration.
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