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Managing knowledge for business performance improvement
Edited by Giovanni Schiuma
1. Introduction
Knowledge has become the most important strategic factor of firms ([38] Spender, 1996), as it is associated with firms' capabilities to achieve a competitive advantage ([40] Teece, 2001). Accordingly, firms have to find ways to adequately manage it. This presents a particular challenge for smaller firms as they usually lack the suitable resources in order to make full usage of their knowledge stock. Under such conditions, this knowledge stock is particularly at risk in situations of staff turnover and/or long-term absences, as the small staffing level does not allow for an immediate replacement. Moreover, the exit of long-term organization members cannot be mastered without certain disruptions ([33] Parise et al. , 2006). It is not uncommon in smaller firms that other staff members take the place of a departed employee in addition to their own workload, or the position remains vacant. Additionally, the firm's knowledge stock is likely to suffer from knowledge attrition, particularly its human capital and relational capital, as the critical tacit knowledge is mainly in the minds of the leaving organization members ([8] Droege and Hoobler, 2003).
This brief discussion clearly illustrates the close connection between knowledge management and succession planning, and the importance of having suitable measures in place to tackle the challenge of turnover or long-term absence. Both topics have been studied extensively. However, there is a tendency to focus on large businesses. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) seem to be neglected, particularly if the two topics are linked. Against the background of the SMEs' significance to many countries, this situation can be assessed as unsatisfactory. Previous studies have shown that there is an absence of systematic knowledge management (e.g. [25] McAdam and Reid, 2001; [44] Wong and Aspinwall, 2005) and succession planning approaches (e.g. [35] Sambrook, 2005; [20] Ip and Jacobs, 2006) in many SMEs. If measures are implemented, they may be regarded as less sophisticated. However, this does not mean that suitable approaches to tackle the problem of knowledge loss are less significant to SMEs success. Instead it can be argued that a suitable handling of knowledge is an especially important factor as to whether a firm survives or not.
Therefore, the aim of this work...