Resource-Based View of Knowledge Management for Competitive Advantage in an organization

We are living in the Knowledge era, a new age which is presumably to have a different perspective or point of view and which will involve a new route for doing businesses. Smart and speedy is vital to the success of organizations in increasingly changing set of the knowledge age. The expansion and practice of KM (knowledge management) is dramatically and continuously growing in firms.

For reason of development in knowledge management, the speed for acquiring a competitive advantage by means of knowledge grows at faster rate as compared to the past. KM has also been demonstrated for its prospective contribution in creating SCA (sustained competitive advantages) for firms. The accusation that knowledge management might be able to generate SCA (sustained competitive advantage) for organizations is provoking; working in this field is relatively underdeveloped, both theoretically and empirically. The recent studies on competitive advantage and knowledge management have stressed description, rather than empirical research knowledge management could achieve to such an advantage.

A possible or potential infrastructure for expanding the conceptual analysis of knowledge management’s impacts on firm's CA (competitive advantage) is the RBV (resource-based view) of the organization which relates the CA of firms with capabilities and resources that are difficult to imitate and firm-specific. The RBV is recently the commanding theoretical view in strategic management published literature, and it concerns with expensive attributes of an organization which are viewed as the basic pillars of SA (competitive advantage).

In RBV (resource-based view), knowledge is viewed as a strategic benefit or asset with the outcome potential to be a source of SCA (sustainable competitive advantage) for a company. The RBV of the organization extends and builds upon the resource-based theory of the organization. It originally developed by Penrose (1959) and enlarged by others (Alavi and Leidner 2001). It encircles the aspects and features to knowledge combination or integration and the four initial method by which knowledge is arranged.