Change Knowledge Management: Transforming a Ghost Community Into a Real Asset

Building Organizational Innovation

The organizational abilities to generate and gain from innovation are sources of durable advantages of firms. As technological innovation is an organized process, more research on the existence, diffusion and effectiveness of organizational innovations and knew management practices is needed.

As a complex concept “Organizational innovation” includes several dimensions, such as competitive strategy (i.e. role of innovation, costs, knowledge, personnel, and technologies); structural characteristics of the organization such as hierarchy, functional lines, and organizational boundaries; work processes including the use of different production inputs, the flow of work, job design, work allocation, and use of suppliers and subcontractors; and industrial relation practices involving the strategies and institutional structures affecting the labour-management relationship.

In another perspective, organizational changes include three broad streams:

• 1.

  the restructuring of production processes, which include business reengineering, downsizing, flexible work arrangements, outsourcing, greater integration among functional lines, and decentralization;

• 2.

  product/service quality-related practices emphasizing total quality management and improving coordination with customers/suppliers; and

• 3.

  human resource management practices, which include performance-based pay, institutional structures affecting the labour-management relations, flexible job design, employee involvement, and improving employees’ skills.