Critical Enablers for Knowledge Creation Process: Synthesizing the Literature

1. Introduction In today's global economy, knowledge is overturning the old rules of strategy. Global competition as the foundation of industrialized economics has shifted from natural resources to intellectual assets in such a way that current era is titled knowledge era. Knowledge is identified as a unique strategic wellspring to empower the businesses since it can efficiently propel the existing knowledge, distribute it throughout the company, utilize it within the processes, products, or services, and bring considerable competitive advantage (Grant, 1991). In recent decades knowledge has had a remarkable growth so that more than 90 percent of world knowledge has been created in 20th century and currently the volume of knowledge doubles every five years and a half (Afrazeh, 2008). This great evolution both in the context of economy and knowledge has created a new approach in business management called "knowledge management". According to the Davenport (1994) it is defined as the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge. While the definition holds the simplicity and is easy to comprehend, another definition was offered by Duhon (1998) which is probably the most cited and accepted one: "Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identify, capture, assess, retrieve, and share all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets can include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers. " Having defined the knowledge management, knowledge management enablers (KMEs) and knowledge creation process (KCP) as well as their interaction delineate important aspects of knowledge management. Organizations need a driving force (KMEs) to manage their knowledge and generate new knowledge (KCP). KMEs have been classified in different ways and their impact on the KCP has been studied by many scholars. In this paper, first we discuss the concepts of KCP and KMEs and present some of their areas of application. Then, the previous studies regarding the impact of KMEs on the KCP is drawn upon and the relationship among the variables of these concepts is scrutinized to provide an insightful review for the future studies. The rest of the paper is as follows. Next section defines the KMEs and KCP and briefly surveys the most recent literature for each concept. Section 3 scrutinizes the effect of each KME and its variables on the KCP by integrating the previous works. Finally, section 4 discusses the findings, concludes the paper, and offers avenues for future research. 2. KCP and KMEs Concepts 2.1. KCP Knowledge creation is defined as a continuous process in which the knowledge created by individuals becomes available and amplified within the organization's knowledge system (Krogh et al, 2012). The success of companies in the today's competitive markets is highly dependent to the degree to which they create new knowledge. Integrating different types of knowledge and experiences is vital to foster innovation and learning (Passila et al., 2013). These facts highlight the importance of KCP in any company. The theory of knowledge creation was first introduced by Nonaka (Sundaresan and Zhang, 2012) which consisted of four distinctive interactions between tacit and explicit knowledge. The model was then reinforced and expanded in 1995 by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995). According to the proposed definition, the KCP model concerns the conversions between tacit and explicit knowledge and is made up of four intertwined activities; Socialization, Externalization, Combination, and Internalization (also referred to as SECI model). Figure 1 represents these four activities and the way they interact with respect to tacit and explicit knowledge. Socialization implies people that share knowledge through more traditional methods like direct person-to-person contacts and foster new tacit knowledge such as shared mental models and technical skills. …