Abstract:

Knowledge management has been somewhat of an impetus to business approaches among today’s global business enterprises. This phenomenon is evident in the changing trends of business outlook and perspective (example: focus on intangible assets such as ideas, experience and knowledge) due to the growth of knowledge-based industries (example: Yahoo, Goggle, Amazon) and innovation propelled by the advent of the Internet. Drucker (1998) predicted that the organization of the future would be knowledge-based and would comprise of specialists that form self-managed teams and performs through organized feedback from colleagues, customers and headquarters.  The underlying theme of KM seems to be based on deriving value, collaborative networks and learning skills. (Malhotra, 2000). Consequently companies are compelled to be able to be innovative and leverage on intangible knowledge (example ideas, experience) to sustain performance within the business-web (b-webs) environment. As such this paper aims to develop a conceptual KM framework for B-web enterprises in order to identify new business drivers and understanding the level of complexity of knowledge internalization throughout organizational processes. This conceptual framework represents the first stage of an empirical study on the extent of knowledge value added amongst b-web entities.