Other writers, tend to treat knowledge as though it were an embedded entity and
assume it is located in social, cultural, technological and organisational contexts.
Hamel and Prahalad (1994), for example, suggest that in order for companies to
innovate they will have to identify, and subsequently exploit, their ‘core capabilities’.
They thus imply that the key strategic challenge for companies is to identify the
specific combinations of specialist social, cultural and technological knowledge and
skill, which provide them with their unique competitive edge in the marketplace, and
which will provide a platform for further innovation in the design and delivery of
products and services.
In contrast, other writers argue that innovation, and hence wealth creation, is dependent
upon the successful acquisition and exploitation of the tacit knowledge (Nonaka and
Takeuchi (1995) and Nonaka and Konno (1998); Spender 1996; Wenger 1998).
Writers who adopt this position therefore, tend to view knowledge as though it was an
encultured phenomenon. Thus, they suggest that if innovation is to become an ongoing
concern for organisations, the ‘tacit’ knowledge that is ‘situated’ within workplace
‘communities of practice’ must be made explicit and used to improve product and
service delivery.
Finally, other writers have recognised that a considerable amount of knowledge is now
encoded in the design of products and services (Lash and Urry 1994) or in computer-
mediated signs and symbols (Zuboff 1988). One consequence of this development is
that the scope for further innovations is dependent upon those staff who are either
involved in the encoding process or who have access to encoded computer-mediated
information having the following skills. They have to be able to mediate between
different types of expertise in order to create new products and services (Engestrom et
al 1995, Nonaka and Teece 2001) or to develop collective interpretations of symbolic
data in order to broker new solutions to organisational problems (Weick 1985).