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Knowledge imitation, knowledge transfer and knowledge protection are coexisting strategies implemented by the current leaders of knowledge-intensive organizations (KIOs). KIOs learn from other firms’ failures and successes through vicarious learning while seeking to protect key knowledge from rivals (Rivkin, 2001). Inside the firm, knowledge transfer involves either actively communicating to others what one knows or actively consulting others to learn what they know (Van den Hoof and De Ridder, 2004). The ability to transfer knowledge across units has been linked to firm performance (Argote and Ingram, 2000; Darr et al., 1995; Epple et al., 1996). We adopt Kumar and Ganesh’s (2009, p. 163) definition of knowledge transfer as “a process of exchange of explicit or tacit knowledge between two agents, during which one agent purposefully receives and uses the knowledge provided by another”. A key question for leaders of KIOs is how to manage the tension between promoting knowledge transfer inside the firm and preventing knowledge imitation from outside the firm. The difficulty is that if something is hard to imitate, it may also be hard to transfer within the firm, and if something is easy to transfer within the firm, it may also be easy to imitate by rivals (Faria and Sofka, 2010; Jensen and Szulanski, 2007; Szulanski and Jensen, 2006; Van Wijk et al., 2008).
In their morphology of knowledge transfer research, Kumar and Ganesh (2009) identified multiple mechanisms, including movement of people (Takii, 2004), movement of tools (Berry, 2003), movement of tasks (Winter and Szulanski, 2001), movement of networks (Argote and Ingram, 2000), codification (Watson and Hewett, 2006) and personalization (Borgatti and Cross, 2003). Similarly, in a recent review, Argote and Miron-Spektor (2011) examined the effectiveness of knowledge transfer mechanisms (Rosenkopf and Almeida, 2003), such as movement of personnel (Song et al., 2003), alliances (Gulati, 1999), technology (Kane and Alavi, 2007), templates (Jensen and Szulanski, 2007), social networks (Reagans and McEvily, 2003) and routines (Darr et al., 1995). Argote and Ingram (2000) propose that a solution to the tension between transferring and protecting knowledge is to embed knowledge in the networks involving members (e.g. social networks of individuals, division of tasks among individuals, tool expertise across individuals and links among individuals, tasks and tools). Their argument is...