In the new economy, firms are willing to pay abundant premiums for the significant entrepreneurial capacities of management and staff in order to develop, build, protect, transfer and integrate knowledge. Although companies and scholars have indeed recognized the value of knowledge management, they have not generally included customer, supplier, and competitor knowledge, preferring to emphasize the process of knowledge acquisit
With the rapid changes and pressure of global competition, the business environment has become much more complicated. Thus, to survive, enterprises must maintain and utilize internal and external knowledge. Colin and Magda (2002) believed that building enterprise value originated from intangible assets, such as knowledge, while Quinn (1993) thought that three-quarters of the value added in many corporations came from specific knowledge property rights. Drucker (1985) suggested that ‘knowledge’ would replace machinery, equipment, capital, raw material and labor to become the most important factor for the productive element in industry. Nonaka, Toyama, and Konno (2000) assumed that the competitive advantages of successful Japanese enterprises were mostly derived from knowledge creation and constant innovation. Thus, for enterprises knowledge is not only a core competence to cultivate, but also a key element for survival in the marketplace. Consequently, effective knowledge management (KM) has become a crucial issue for businesses (Renzl, 2008), the basic foundation for creating and sustaining their core competence capabilities.
Organizations are now facing both global and local competitions, and thus the top managers should review the internal and external environments in order to understand an enterprise's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in formulating their KM strategy (Ndlela & du Toit, 2001). In other words, entrepreneurial leaders must be able to make good decisions based on limited information in order to develop dynamic core capabilities to better recognize and exploit every business opportunity (Wakefield, 2005). Nevertheless, we do not yet fully understand how managers absorb information and transform it into their own knowledge during their interactions with the external environment. Thus, this study proposes a conceptual framework to investigate how enterprises apply internal knowledge chain activities to gain external knowledge, as well as how they filter, condense, transform their knowledge to enhance sustainable competitive advantages (Chen & Hsiang, 2007). Moreover, through utilizing a knowledge chain model, the impact of customer, supplier, and competitor knowledge on the firm's knowledge are analyzed and demonstrated by means of case studies. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the literature review, while Section 3 establishes and proposes the conceptual framework. Section 4 outlines the research methodology, and Sections 5 and 6 illustrate a detailed discussion of the case studies’ findings about customer, supplier, and competitor knowledge, and knowledge chain activities. Finally, Section 7 summarizes and concludes the research findings.
Although higher returns to scale and greater growth potential are generated by products with a high knowledge component, near identical products and processes quickly arrive on the market, eroding competitive advantage. Therefore, a firm should be quicker and more innovative than its competitors (Frederick & McIlroy, 1999). However, the knowledge creation required for this does not merely occur inside an enterprise, but can also be generated through relations with other firms (Albino et al., 1999 and Davenport and Prusak, 1998). Thus, this study investigates how enterprises apply internal knowledge chain activities to gain customer, supplier, and competitor knowledge, as well as transforming this to enhance enterprise competitiveness. After conducting a review of literature and expert interviews, a clear picture emerged, an illustration of which is provided in Fig. 2. This image indicates that an enterprise's knowledge is supported by an infrastructure which includes customer, supplier, and competitor knowledge (Hsu, Chen, & Hsueh, 2006). Enterprises can then apply the primary activities of the knowledge chain to acquire, select, generate, internalize, and externalize this knowledge to enhance competitiveness. Therefore, the process presented here can serve as a powerful framework for how an enterprise obtains customer, supplier, and competitor knowledge. In addition, the knowledge chain presented in conjunction with this framework can help a company to absorb such knowledge.
