Publications

16 Jun 2003
Research & Ideas

Researchers Contribute Globalization of Markets Papers

the keys to their successful global expansions? By HBS professors David Bell, Rajiv Lal, and Walter Salmon. Global Knowledge Sharing And Performance Drivers Organizing Multinational Companies: Building a... View Details

Keywords: by Working Knowledge editors

04 Jan 2010
Research & Ideas

Best of HBS Working Knowledge 2009

What were the management trends in 2009? Fascination with social networking and rethinking common wisdom about goal setting. Here are the Top 10 articles and Top 5 working papers that appeared in HBS Working... View Details

Keywords: by Staff

08 Sep 2015
Research & Ideas

Knowledge Transfer: You Can't Learn Surgery By Watching

are you won’t ever learn how to pull off a triple bypass. And yet, in business, companies routinely expect employees to pick up new job knowledge through vicarious learning—through reading descriptions of tasks in knowledge-management... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Health

Article

Dismantling Knowledge Boundaries at NASA: The Critical Role of Professional Identity in Open Innovation

By: Hila Lifshitz - Assaf

Using a longitudinal in-depth field study at NASA, I investigate how the open, or peer-production, innovation model affects R&D professionals, their work, and the locus of innovation. R&D professionals are known for keeping their knowledge work within clearly defined... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Knowledge Boundaries; Boundary Work; Professional Identity; Open Innovation; Identity Work; Technological Change; Nasa; Innovation and Invention; Knowledge; Science; Technology; Engineering; Change; Aerospace Industry; North and Central America

2017
Working Paper

Inequality in Knowledge Repository Use in Scaling Service Operations

By: Melissa A. Valentine, Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats and Amy C. Edmondson

To scale service operations requires sharing knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge sharing networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository (KR)... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Repository; Scaling Service Operations; Fluid Teams; Groups and Teams; Knowledge Management; Performance

SSRN

Article

Turbulent Stability of Emergent Roles: The Dualistic Nature of Self-Organizing Knowledge Co-Production

By: Ofer Arazy, Johaness Daxenberg, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Oded Nov and Irene Gurevych

Increasingly, new forms of organizing for knowledge production are built around self-organizing co-production community models with ambiguous role definitions. Current theories struggle to explain how high-quality knowledge is developed in these settings and how... View Details

Keywords: Wikipedia; Knowledge Production; Organizational Structure; Knowledge; Information Publishing

10 Jan 2005
Research & Ideas

The Knowledge Coach

are several rungs on the ladder of expertise: novice, apprentice, journeyman, and then master. Each individual reaching a rung above novice has knowledge to impart to those on the lower rungs of the ladder, although it is likely... View Details

Keywords: by Dorothy Leonard & Walter Swap

02 Aug 2012
Working Paper Summaries

The Rich Get Richer: Enabling Conditions for Knowledge Use in Organizational Work Teams

Keywords: by Melissa A. Valentine, Bradley R. Staats & Amy C. Edmondson

06 Jun 2016
Research & Ideas

Skills and Behaviors that Make Entrepreneurs Successful

understanding of the entrepreneurial leader. The program combines self-assessments of their skills and behaviors by entrepreneurs themselves with evaluations of them by peers, friends, and employees. Along... View Details

Keywords: by HBS Working Knowledge

06 Jan 2020
Research & Ideas

Motivate Your High Performers to Share Their Knowledge

Sometimes a little push like that is all employees need to get out of a rut. About the Author Michael Blanding is a writer based in Boston. [Image: Mark Kostich] Related Reading Ignore This Advice at Your Own Peril Knowledge Transfer: You... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

July 2020
Article

The Role of Interdependence in the Microfoundations of Organization Design: Task, Goal, and Knowledge Interdependence

By: Marlo Raveendran (formerly Goetting), Luciana Silvestri and Ranjay Gulati

Interdependence is a core concept in organization design, yet one that has remained consistently understudied. Current notions of interdependence remain rooted in seminal works, produced at a time when managers’ near-perfect understanding of the task at hand drove the... View Details

Keywords: Interdependence; Organizational Behavior; Work Design; Organizational Design; Goals and Objectives; Knowledge Sharing

Register to Read

2011
Book

Managing Knowledge Assets, Creativity and Innovation

By: Dorothy A. Leonard

This book pulls together for the first time works on knowledge and innovation, including the implementation of new processes and products, written by Dorothy A. Leonard over more than two decades. It consists of articles from journals in diverse fields (e.g. the... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Management; Innovation and Invention

Purchase

2022
Article

How Does Working from Home during COVID-19 Affect What Managers Do? Evidence from Time-Use Studies

By: Thomaz Teodorovicz, Raffaella Sadun, Andrew L. Kun and Orit Shaer

We assess how the sudden and widespread shift to working from home during the pandemic impacted how managers allocate time throughout their working day. We analyze the results from an online time-use survey with data on 1,192 knowledge workers (out of which 973 are... View Details

Keywords: Time-use; Working-from-home; COVID; Managers; Knowledge Workers; Health Pandemics; Time Management

May 2016
Article

Return Migration and Geography of Innovation in MNEs: A Natural Experiment of Knowledge Production by Local Workers Reporting to Return Migrants

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury

I study whether return migrants facilitate knowledge production by local employees working for them at geographically distant R&D locations. Using unique personnel and patenting data for 1,315 employees at the Indian R&D center of a Fortune 500 technology firm, I... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Innovation and Invention

June 2011 (Revised May 2012)
Case

L'Oréal: Global Brand, Local Knowledge

By: Rebecca M. Henderson and Ryan Johnson

Worldwide, and in the U.S. marketplace in particular, the French cachet of L'Oréal was one of its most powerful marketing tools. However, with the opening up of emerging markets, L'Oréal had to cater to a diverse customer base: an aging population in the West, ethnic... View Details

Keywords: Globalization; Brands and Branding; Marketing Communications; Change Management; Sales; Emerging Markets; Segmentation; Innovation and Invention; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; France; United States

Educators

Purchase

03 May 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Learning by Supplying

Keywords: by Juan Alcácer & Joanne Oxley

Spring 2019
Article

Fluid Teams and Knowledge Retrieval: Scaling Service Operations

By: Melissa A. Valentine, Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats and Amy C. Edmondson

To scale service operations requires retrieving knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository has the... View Details

Keywords: Teaming; Teams; Groups and Teams; Knowledge Management; Service Delivery; Knowledge Use and Leverage