Abstract
Abstract The ability to transfer best practices internally is critical to a firm's ability to build competitive advantage through the appropriation of rents from scarce internal knowledge. Just as a firm's distinctive competencies might be difficult for other firms to imitate, its best practices could be difficult to imitate internally. Yet, little systematic attention has been paid to such internal stickiness. The author analyzes internal stickiness of knowledge transfer and tests the resulting model using canonical correlation analysis of a data set consisting of 271 observations of 122 best‐practice transfers in eight companies. Contrary to conventional wisdom that blames primarily motivational factors, the study findings show the major barriers to internal knowledge transfer to be knowledge‐related factors such as the recipient's lack of absorptive capacity, causal ambiguity, and an arduous relationship between the source and the recipient.
Keywords
AppropriationAmbiguityEconomic rentKnowledge transferBusinessAbsorptive capacityIndustrial organizationSet (abstract data type)MarketingKnowledge managementEconomicsMicroeconomicsComputer scienceEpistemology
Affiliated Institutions
Related Publications
Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning and Innovation
In this paper, we argue that the ability of a firm to recognize the value of new, external information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends is critical to its innovat...
The Persistence and Transfer of Learning in Industrial Settings
The persistence of learning within organizations and the transfer of learning across organizations are examined on data collected from multiple organizations. Results indicate t...
Nutritional Rickets in San Diego
Despite the ability of infants to synthesize vitamin D through exposure to sunlight, nutritional rickets occasionally develops in infants even in areas with perennially sunny cl...
GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding
Human ability to understand language is general, flexible, and robust. In contrast, most NLU models above the word level are designed for a specific task and struggle with out-o...
Predicting the clinical status of human breast cancer by using gene expression profiles
Prognostic and predictive factors are indispensable tools in the treatment of patients with neoplastic disease. For the most part, such factors rely on a few specific cell surfa...
Publication Info
- Year
- 1996
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- S2
- Pages
- 27-43
- Citations
- 7687
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
7687
OpenAlex
Cite This
Gabriel Szulanski
(1996).
Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm.
Strategic Management Journal
, 17
(S2)
, 27-43.
https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250171105
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1002/smj.4250171105