From Knowledge Management to Strategic Competence: Measuring Technological, Market and Organisational Innovation

Citation

Cuddy, C. (2001), "From Knowledge Management to Strategic Competence: Measuring Technological, Market and Organisational Innovation", The Bottom Line, Vol. 14 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2001.17014bae.003

From Knowledge Management to Strategic Competence: Measuring Technological, Market and Organisational Innovation

From Knowledge Management to Strategic Competence: Measuring Technological, Market and Organisational Innovation

Tidd, J. (Ed.)Series on Technology Management, Volume 3Imperial College PressLondon2000

Keywords: Management, Core competences, Organizational learning, Technological innovation

Joe Tidd edits this book, which features contributions from both academics and business practitioners. It is the third book in the Series on Technology Management published by Imperial College Press. Tidd is the Head of the Management of Innovation Specialization at Imperial College and has written what has been described as "the first textbook to integrate management, technological and organizational change". In addition, he has held numerous positions in academia.

The objective of the book is to describe competencies and "re-establish the links between strategic competencies, knowledge management, organizational learning and innovation management". The focus is on improving financial performance through the development of a technological strategy resulting in the development of a technological advantage in the particular industry or field of the organization in question.

The book is divided into five parts: "Strategic Competencies", "Market competencies", Technological competencies", "Organisational competencies", and "Improving competencies". It contains 11 chapters written by various authors in academia or practicing in the business world. Each chapter has a lengthy literature review. The book contains a comprehensive bibliography and a brief (two page) index.

In chapter one, Tidd discusses the competence cycle and sets the tone for the chapters that follow. He describes the differences between developing core competencies and strategic business units in addition to the importance of developing a knowledge network and communities of practice. He stresses the link between individual and organizational learning and concludes by breaking the competence cycle down into three manageable parts. The remaining chapters in Part I stress the importance of businesses measuring intangible assets. The second chapter discusses the advantages of a knowledge-based view of strategy versus a resource-based view of strategy and the third chapter uses a real life example to discuss the bridge between strategic vision and operating reality.

The two chapters in Part II of the book look at benchmarking and PIMS, the Profit Impact of Market Strategy. Both discuss the measurement of intangibles as well as other ways to measure innovation, such as the Innovation Scoreboard, and provide some areas for future research.

Part III contains two particularly strong chapters. The first reviews the attempts made to measure activities that generate technological change at a firm level and identifies three approaches. The author, Pari Patel, views patent and R&D statistics and takes statistical analysis a step further by suggesting the importance of gathering statistics on the education of employees in engineering and science. The second chapter of Part III examines citation analysis techniques as applied to both patents and research articles to measure how "cutting edge" a company's technology really is. It is an interesting take on the bibliometrics approach to data analysis.

The first chapter of Part IV, "Technological competencies", considers identification, development and use of technologically based knowledge assets or competencies. It examines the C-Space (culture space) and the social learning cycle and proposes workshops to explore and identify core competencies at an organizational level. This chapter would be very helpful for a business looking to identity core competencies. Assessing performance in supply is examined in chapter 9. The chapter introduces some new concepts that suggest that measuring a supplier's performance is undergoing a major innovation.

The final part of the book is perhaps the most practical. Chapter 10 examines models of integrated performance measurement and presents case studies. Chapter 11, the closing chapter of the book, is particularly good. It focuses on the importance of learning and continuous improvement, referring to the Japanese kaizen model. Nine characteristics of learning organizations are offered to the reader. The difficulties in establishing and sustaining continuous learning are also discussed.

This book is recommended for managers interested in measuring innovation as well as academics and graduate students interested in pursuing further research on the topic. This book is a nice complement to Tidd's textbook, Managing Innovation, which might be a better starting point for those new to the subject. However, the lengthy literature reviews in each chapter may provide a sufficient background for those who wish to jump into the subject of measuring and managing technological innovation.

Colleen CuddySystems Librarian, Ehrman Medical Library, NYU School of Medicine