Knowledge Sharing and Open Innovation

Knowledge resources, mainly due to their causal ambiguity and inimitability, play a central role in shaping the competitive advantage of organizations. This chapter aims to illustrate a correspondence between knowledge types and organizational types in open innovation (OI) networks. It maps the knowledge types that shape diverse institutions of the economy as presented by the Triple Helix model: episteme at the academia, techne at the industry, and phronesis at the government. Each organization — beyond its institutional knowledge specialization — diversifies to incorporate the other two knowledge types in its knowledge integration portfolio. For example, a university may develop technologies and conduct responsible research and/or a firm may conduct scientific research and engage in corporate social responsibility activities. The implications of these institutional specialization and organizational diversification in OI networks are twofold: (a) organizations can gain a competitive edge by diversifying into a unique portfolio of knowledge integration encompassing a novel proportion of episteme, techne, and phronesis and (b) to achieve the highest level of knowledge integration, organizations belonging to diverse institutions can engage in inter-organizational knowledge sharing to meta-integrate their institutionally specialized and organizationally diversified knowledge types.