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Academic journals still navigate the relatively closed space of academic peer domains, but knowledge production explodes and blows up in a cloud of expanding “gases” of knowledges slowly solidifying into tectonically mobile continents. This paper seeks to address these issues. It also provides an overview of seven published papers.

This paper uses a viewpoint approach as well as introducing the current issue.

The paper finds that “everything in knowledge production and dissemination has changed”, which will have consequences and implications in areas such as research domain independence and the role of the academic journal.

This paper raises the issues of change in knowledge production and dissemination, and of possible redefinition in the areas of change management and cross‐cultural knowledge. It also introduces the seven papers in the current issue.

The purpose of this paper is to explore communication challenges related to geographic distance, with emphasis on differences in national culture and language between R&D and manufacturing engineers, in a development project faced with uncertainty and equivocality.

The results originate from a longitudinal single-case study of a commercial product development project.

Three communication challenges are identified: clarity of shared information, intention to share information, and responsiveness to information received. The challenges are strongly associated with differences in national culture and language. The study also indicates that the communication challenges cannot only be handled by the use of rich communication media, but also by employment of communication media of low richness such as e-mails or “picture books”.

The single-case study approach limits the ability to generalize the findings. Future research should thus focus on additional studies of geographically separated R&D and manufacturing.

The results from the study provide important insights for the management of product development in geographically dispersed settings. The findings emphasize the need to consider potential differences in national culture and language within a product development team. Acknowledging these differences and managing them properly can support efficiency of product development projects.

This study aims to identify the organizational antecedents of intra‐organizational customer knowledge dissemination in the context of key account management (KAM).

The data were collected from large industrial companies in Finland by means of a structured survey. Linear hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

The findings of the study show that esprit de corps among employees and the formalization of key account management facilitate customer knowledge dissemination in industrial key account organizations. Moreover, the findings show that the intra‐organizational dissemination of customer knowledge is positively related to the supplier's KAM performance and dissemination fully mediates the relationship between esprit de corps and KAM performance.

The study contributes to research on key account management in providing quantitative empirical evidence about the antecedents and consequences of the intra‐organizational dissemination of key account‐related knowledge.

Building on previous research on customer knowledge management, market orientation and key account management, the study identifies customer‐specific knowledge dissemination as an intra‐organizational determinant of the successful management of industrial key account relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between knowledge management and the quality of new product and identify different hidden patterns in which knowledge acquisition and dissemination affect the quality of new product.

Employs Additivity and Variance Stabilization (AVAS) analysis.

The quality of new product is related to knowledge management significantly.

Implies that if organizations fail to understand the subtle ways by which different dimensions of knowledge acquisition and dissemination influence product quality, they may fail to harvest the full value of knowledge management in quality assurance.

It is one of the first to assess the link between knowledge management and quality assurance.

The concepts of customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management (KM) both focus on allocating resources to supportive business activities in order to gain competitive advantages. CRM focuses on managing the relationship between a company and its current and prospective customer base as a key to success, while KM recognizes the knowledge available to a company as a major success factor. From a business process manager’s perspective both the CRM and KM approaches promise a positive impact on cost structures and revenue streams in return for the allocation of resources. However, investments in CRM and KM projects are not without risk, as demonstrated by many failed projects. In this paper we show that the benefit of using CRM and KM can be enhanced and the risk of failure reduced by integrating both approaches into a customer knowledge management (CKM) model. In this regard, managing relationships requires managing customer knowledge – knowledge about as well as from and for customers. In CKM, KM plays the role of a service provider, managing the four knowledge aspects: content, competence, collaboration and composition. Our findings are based on a literature analysis and six years of action research, supplemented by case studies and surveys.

Knowledge management systems have opened new arrays in the present digital environment. Nowadays, because of innumerable features, they have become the choice of many organizations. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the issues of a KM-based digital library system that will support the creation, organization, storage, dissemination and utilization of the institution's digital knowledge assets.

The study is based on viewpoints, a review of existing concepts and the structure of DL and KM, and on the results of an interview of ten DL practitioners world-wide. The respondents are purposively selected from the participants' lists of an international training program (ITP) on “managing electronic information and digital libraries”. The interview is conducted by e-mail using a short, structured and open-ended questionnaire.

The present study finds some significant overlaps between DL and KM and argues that a generic KM process of acquisition, organization, storage and retrieval, and dissemination of knowledge by receiving feedback can suitably be fitted in DL. It is apparent that an integration of KM can add value to building a knowledge sharing culture, promoting the KM culture, and ultimately increase the organizational output. It helps to improve efficiency, to ensure higher productivity and user satisfaction in the library.

Further research can be conducted into designing KM-based DL systems keeping in view the needs and behavior of the users they serve. A deep log analysis of the academically endeavored KM-based systems can be carried out for working out a better and productive DL. The recent study requires a practical investigation.

The outcome of the research will improve the DL system to enhance its effectiveness, staff professionalism and will help in achieving coordination. Knowledge innovation in a DL environment will help in the creation of better and an enlightened knowledge-based society.

The issues discussed here will help in achieving satisfaction levels both on the part of users as well as DL professionals. The proposed issues and structure is an original work and theoretically, they would contribute to the advancement of an academic debate in both the areas of DL and KM.

The fields of organizational behavior (OB)/strategy and marketing have taken different paths over the past two decades to understanding organizational learning. OB/strategy has been pre-occupied with theory development and case study illustrations, whereas marketing has taken a highly quantitative path. Although relying on essentially the same foundation theory, the two disciplines have had minimal crossfertilization. Furthermore, both fields tend to blur or usually ignore the distinction between structural and informal knowledge processes. The purpose of the paper is to highlight the distinction between informal and structural knowledge acquisition and dissemination processes and propose new definitions to differentiate them. Future research should bring together cross-disciplinary studies from OB/strategy and marketing to develop an organizational learning framework to test structural knowledge processes alongside informal knowledge processes.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between knowledge management capacity and organizational performance from the social interaction perspective.

The empirical study employs a questionnaire approach. The sample for this study is drawn from the population of the top 5,000 Taiwanese firms listed in the yearbook published by the China Credit Information Service Incorporation. Regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses in a sample of 105 Taiwanese firms.

The findings suggest that two assessments of knowledge management capacity, knowledge acquisition and dissemination, and the communication factor of social interaction are positively related to organizational performance. Further, social interaction has complementary or synergistic interaction effects with knowledge management capacity on organizational performance.

Given the need for the use of knowledge management capacity as an enabler to improve organization outcome, firms need to be aware that social interaction would moderate the link between knowledge management capacity and organizational performance. Therefore, firms should pay special attention to formulate appropriate social interaction conditions under which knowledge acquisition and dissemination are most likely to enhance organizational performance.

This study contributes to the literature by theoretically developing a conceptual model and then empirically examining the relationships among knowledge management capacity, social interaction, and organizational performance.

This study seeks to provide a broad ranging review that identifies, summarises and integrates the different multi-level approaches contributing to advances in research on measuring IC. This furthermore sets out and highlights an agenda for future research.

Deploying a systematic and thorough review of the literature, the authors were able to identify 60 articles and identify the main theories applied and the respective methodological orientations of these articles across three levels of analysis: micro, meso and macro.

The study's findings suggest that the literature on measuring IC has approached the theme across three different levels –micro, meso and macro. In addition, the results enable the identification of seven dimensions to IC: competitive advantage, economic value generated, resources and capacities, corporate governance, IC components, innovation management and the dissemination of IC.

The mixed-methods approach, which combines a traditional systematic literature review with ontological thematic analysis, casts light on the core aspects that led to the identification of a new approach in the academic literature on measuring IC.

This study puts forward a holistic model with measurements for IC across the three levels of analysis as well as the respective criteria for choosing the variables.

This study represents a first attempt to analyse the emerging literature on IC measurement through a multi-level approach; integrating and extracting the potential theoretical contributions in this field of knowledge; proposing an integrated model as well as a theoretically relevant and innovative research agenda that opens up paths to future research projects.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.