Instead of recycling existing knowledge and maintaining the same results, actively managing organisational knowledge enables gaps to be exposed which can be exploited and leveraged to create sustainable growth.

 

Two definitions which highlight the importance of managing organisational knowledge:

 

Orlikowski (2002) considered that

 

'knowledge is enacted in the collaborative processes of organizational members and it is emergent and dynamic'.

 

and,

 

Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2001: 973) defined organizational knowledge as,

 

'The capability, which members of an organization developed, to draw distinctions in the process of carrying out their work, in particular concrete contexts, by enacting sets of generalisations whose application depends on historically evolved collective understanding'.