تاثیر مدیریت دانش استراتژیک بر عملکرد دانشگاه ها: رویکرد تجربی The effect of strategic knowledge management on the universities’ performance: an empirical approach

1. Introduction n 1958, Penrose defined, for the first time, a firm as a pool of knowledge and its supply of services as the result of the experience and knowledge of its employees (Penrose, 1958). After this definition, many authors have studied the relation between knowledge management (KM) and firm’s performance, as well as the way in which KM involves all actors (government, academia, industry and civil society) that take part in the acquisition and transfer of knowledge inside and outside of organisations (Carayannis and Campbell, 2006, 2009, 2011; Miller et al., 2011). The knowledge-based theory of the firm (Grant, 1996) also recognises knowledge as the most significant resource of a firm, and its relevance as input factor to the achievement of organisational goals (Kalling, 2003; Marr et al., 2004). In the literature on KM, most researchers have studied the value of knowledge in organisations from two perspectives: the value of the “knowledge employee” and the value of the “learning organisation”. From the first perspective, researchers have found evidences of that the increase of the productivity obtained by “knowledge employees” is a relevant factor of the firms’ competitive behaviour (Andersson et al., 2005; Calvo, 2011; Warren and Kourdi, 2003). From the second perspective, the main research outcomes show that “learning organisations” use their capacity to learn better and faster than competitors as source of sustainable competitive advantage (Senge, 1990) and innovation (Ferreira et al., 2015). Stemming from previous approaches, a KM system can be regarded as the way of joining the individual knowledge of employees, especially strategic knowledge, in a learning organisation. Given that the explicit knowledge could be documented and shared to encourage individuals’ learning (Andriani, 2001; Grant, 1996), the way in which it is stored, used and transmitted (i.e. strategic knowledge management or SKM) may contribute to the success of the organisation (Lam, 1997). Thus, some researchers have found evidence that supports the relationship between KM practices and organisational performance (Del ReyChamorro et al., 2003; Zack et al., 2009, O¨Dell et al., 2003). In this context, the advent of information technology (IT) has allowed developing IT solutions that work as SKM systems. These IT solutions for SKM are aimed at facilitating knowledge-sharing, or in other words, enabling explicit knowledge to flow within a “learning organisation” of “knowledge employees”. Although the effect of the KM practices on the organisational performance is the way to understand the strategic value of knowledge, most of the researchers have focused on big companies, forgetting the application of this perspective to the analysis of universities as knowledge-driven organisations. In addition, the few studies focused in universities mainly offer theoretical insights (Asma and Abdellatif, 2016) coming from case studies. Although these cases highlight the importance of the KM dimensions (Singh and Sharma, 2011), the collaboration networks (Ronda-Pupo and Guerras-Martin, 2016; Tan, 2016; Fari and Ocholla, 2015), the impact of IT-based KM intervention (Ranjan et al., 2012; Branco et al., 2015) or the use of data mining (Hegazi et al., 2016), it is difficult to extrapolate through these outcomes the cause-effect relations existing between IT solutions for SKM and universities’ performance in a specific country. Furthermore, these studies analyse a reduced group of universities (Branco et al., 2015; Fari and Ocholla, 2015; Singh and Sharma, 2011; Ranjan et al., 2012) or only deal with a single component of SKM (Hegazi et al., 2016; Fari and Ocholla, 2015; Ronda-Pupo and Guerras-Martin, 2016; Tan, 2016) which limits the understanding of the relation, SKM-universities’ performance.