Knowledge management in the extended and virtual enterprises: A review of the current literature

The models of the extended and virtual enterprise (EE/VE), that are increasingly attracting the attention of scholars and practitioners, represent new modalities of organisation of inter-firm relationships aimed to increase flexibility and responsiveness in a global competitive environment. The functioning of those structures has important implications in terms of Knowledge Management (KM). Actually, the EE/VE forms originate from the fact that the single firm is not capable to internally develop and manage all the knowledge needed to be competitive in the global economic environment, and hence it must resort to external sources of knowledge. This raises several questions, i.e.: how can knowledge assets be managed in an interorganisational context? How should inter-organisational knowledge transfers be effectively organised and managed? What are the opportunities and limitations of ICT applications for this? In principle, the literature of Knowledge Management offers important suggestions to face such questions. However, the studies of KM have originally developed in relation to other contexts of application (namely, the problem of managing knowledge within the single firm). It is only recently that scholars have started to investigate the issue of interorganisational KM, with a particular reference to the so-called knowledge networks (i.e. inter-organisational solutions formed to create and share new knowledge). This paper presents a critical analysis of the recent literature on the overlapping issue of EE/VE on the one hand, and inter-organisational KM on the other. The main purpose is to identify notions, concepts, and approaches of the two areas of study that may useful to develop a systematic approach of KM in the EE/VE models.