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Market knowledge is usually believed to be useful. Both the concepts of “knowledge” and “useful” are, however, rather ambiguous and used in multiple ways. The concepts are clarified, and requirements for adequate knowledge use discussed. An important conclusion is that academian marketing knowledge can be useful, requiring, however, both knowledge, time‐consuming and motivated efforts.

This paper proposes to rethink the concepts of relevance and usefulness and their relation to the theory–practice gap in management research.

On the basis of the cognitive-linguistic relevance theory or inferential pragmatics, supplemented by insights from information science, we define relevance as a general conceptual category, while reserving usefulness for the instrumental application in a particular case.

There is no reason to hold onto the difference between theoretical and practical relevance, nor to distinguish between instrumental and conceptual relevance.

This novel approach will help to clarify the confusion in the field and contribute to a better understanding of the added value of management research.

It is commonly assumed that a prime purpose of developing research‐based marketing knowledge is that it should be useful to marketing managers and other practitioners. However, evidence suggests that academic marketing knowledge is only to a limited degree utilised in practical life. It is thus important to understand why this is the case, as well as how use of academic knowledge can be enhanced. This paper focuses on scientific knowledge about market orientation and explores a range of factors, which might impair its practical application. More specifically, it examines what types of knowledge marketing practitioners might perceive as useful and discusses a range of potential barriers to successful transfer of market orientation knowledge from academia to practitioners. Substantial barriers are identified which relate to attributes of market orientation knowledge itself and characteristics of both academics and practitioners. Findings are discussed and implications highlighted.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the process of innovation management in the eighteenth century in the context of the search for precision time keeping in the watch making industry. In particular it looks at how knowledge was managed and transferred among interested stakeholders in the process.

The paper reviews the published horological literature on the subject and considers it within modern theories relating to the management of innovation.

This paper illustrates that personal contact and collaboration is important to the development of innovation. The paper highlights the importance of networking in the process of innovation and collaboration as a means to share and develop ideas. Collaboration with organisations working in adjacent technologies was found to be present and competition promoted by the incentive of financial reward was found to be a motivator factor for moving innovation forward.

This paper will be helpful to academics who study innovation history as well as current innovation management practices.

Knowledge transfer (KT) processes are important for building and sustaining competitive advantages and dynamic capabilities. Prior research often treats KT processes as a firm-level capability, assuming knowledge flows uniformly within a firm. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether such a view is too simplistic because it ignores potential differences between inter-group and intra-group KT processes within a firm.

The authors surveyed 137 software development professionals in a large Japanese electronics firm regarding co-workers who acted as critical sources of useful knowledge and the factors that affected KT within and across internal organizational boundaries. Using regression analysis, the authors test the extent to which factors such as the characteristics of the knowledge, the characteristics of the tie, and the characteristics of the network differentially affect KT within internal organizational boundaries vs across them.

The authors find that factors such as the accessibility of the knowledge source, network density, and collective teaching all help in transferring knowledge, while knowledge tacitness inhibit such transfers, but that the effect of these properties varies significantly depending on whether KT occurs across group boundaries.

Existing research on KT within firms tends to treat all such transfers as uniform, with little difference between the dynamics of within-group transfer and between-group transfer. This study establishes key differences in KT between and within organizational groups, demonstrating that managers need to consider internal boundaries when deploying tools and strategies for facilitating knowledge flows.

Knowledge assets are a critical basis of competition, but knowledge management (KM) often fails to deliver in effectively growing the value of these assets. This paper aims to lay out four shifts required to make knowledge management more effective.

The paper defines four shifts likely in the evolution of KM: “Knowledge Clouds” where knowledge assets within and outside the company become permeable and interconnected in a cloud computing environment; the use of social media and ratings to co‐create user generated ratings, taxonomies and collective organization of knowledge; integrating KM with learning and decision support so users are better empowered to learn, decide and do useful things with knowledge; and everybody becomes a knowledge manager and is clear about how the can contribute to the creation, projection, organization and use of knowledge of assets within and outside the walls of the company.

The paper presents clear reasons KM is vital to the future of business, but probably best obliterated now.

Much of the discussion on KM is centered on the firm. This paper pushes forth provocatively to suggest that the future of KM is best served by obliterating centralized KM to create a more social process where everyone is a knowledge manager.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual model that examines the role of an individual’s confidence in the transferred knowledge in realizing benefits from such transfers. In so doing, the paper attempts to address the gap in the knowledge transfer (KT) literature pertaining to the inability of recipients to gain benefits from incoming transferred knowledge.

The conceptual model has been developed by drawing from the literature on socio-cognitive approaches by using psychological variables (individual-level differences in need for closure, regulatory focus and self-efficacy) and contextual factors that include the perceived novelty of knowledge and positive feedback from social interactions, which influence confidence in incoming knowledge.

The conceptual model builds on the socio-cognitive perspective and explores some of the important issues that could contribute to the individual’s adeptness (or lack thereof) in deriving benefits from transferred knowledge, thus addressing a vital gap in strategy and management literature.

The paper introduces the concept of confidence in knowledge to the KT literature, which could lend valuable insights pertaining to deriving benefits from transferred knowledge. In addition, by highlighting the role of important individual-specific constructs in determining the ability to gain benefits from KT, the paper makes a significant contribution to the stream of research on the micro-foundational bases of strategy. Finally, exploring perceived novelty as a knowledge attribute in this paper adds an interesting perspective to the individuals’ perception of the target knowledge quality and the resulting confidence in the incoming knowledge, which could in turn be moderated by individual differences.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the knowledge-intensive process of creative problem-solving and its outcomes.

This study uses survey data from 113 leading Italian companies. To test the structural relations of the research model the authors used the partial least square (PLS) method.

Results show that work design and training have a positive direct impact on creative problem-solving process while organizational culture has a positive impact on both creative problem-solving process and its outcomes. Finally creative problem-solving process has a strong direct impact on its outcomes and this, in turn, on firms’ competitiveness.

This study suggests that managers must highlight the problem-solving process as it affects a firm’s capability to find creative solutions and therefore its competitiveness. Moreover, the present paper suggests managers should invest in specific knowledge management (KM) practices for enhancing knowledge-intensive business processes.

The present paper fills an important gap in the BPM literature by empirically testing the relationship among KM practices, multistage processes of creative problem-solving and their outcomes, and firms’ competitiveness.