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Balancing Knowledge Protection and Sharing to Create Digital Innovations

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Knowledge Management in Digital Change

Part of the book series: Progress in IS ((PROIS))

Abstract

The creation of digital innovations requires active participation and knowledge sharing on behalf of all collaboration partners in inter-organisational settings. However, while the participants collaborate, they also have their own interests and as they are competitors in many cases, they have to protect their competitive knowledge. Collaboration thus requires balancing of knowledge sharing and protection on both the organizational and individual level. This paper reviews literature from several domains to assess how the balancing act is scoped and what kind of measures to achieve this balance prior research has identified. The balancing act is examined on the channel, partner and artefact levels. The paper identifies the balancing act as decisions made over the course of the collaboration both by the organizations as a whole, and by individuals on concrete knowledge artefacts in their daily work. Implications from the point of view of creating digital innovation are presented.

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Acknowledgements

The Know-Center and Pro2Future are funded within the Austrian COMET Program—Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies—under the auspices of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth and by the State of Styria. COMET is managed by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG.

This research is partly funded by the Finnish Foundation for Economic Education for the second author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pro2Future GmbH and Know-Center GmbH, Graz, Austria

    Stefan Thalmann

  2. Institute for Interactive Systems and Data Science, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Stefan Thalmann

  3. NOVI Research Center, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland

    Ilona Ilvonen

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  1. Stefan Thalmann
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Correspondence to Stefan Thalmann .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Wiesbaden Business School, RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Wiesbaden, Germany

    Klaus North

  2. School of Management, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Ronald Maier

  3. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Bonn, Germany

    Oliver Haas

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Thalmann, S., Ilvonen, I. (2018). Balancing Knowledge Protection and Sharing to Create Digital Innovations. In: North, K., Maier, R., Haas, O. (eds) Knowledge Management in Digital Change. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73546-7_10

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