Innovation through Knowledge Codification

Innovation diffusion effects on student housing investment in Ghana

Purpose

The diffusion of innovations in student housing, a commercial real estate subsector, is a critical concern to developers. Aside from how innovations contribute to investor' returns, there is a question of interest in real estate investment policies and contemporary real estate research. The study aims to assess the extent of innovation diffusion in student housing and its effects on investment returns in Ghana.

Design/methodology/approach

The study used a mixed methods approach foregrounded on the innovation diffusion theory. With the mix of surveys and interviews of 828 student housing managers/investors and 25 key student housing association leaders across selected off-campus student housing among six universities in Ghana, the study used both primary and secondary sources. Selection criteria were based on at least one of these criteria: Have operated in the student housing market over the past ten years, have adopted the use of technology in student housing management, have introduced new student housing marketing strategies and have made improvements (added value) to student housing services. Multiple regression and narratives were the main analytical tools employed in this study.

Findings

The study demonstrates that over the past ten years, student housing investors in Ghana have invested hugely in product, marketing, process and organisation innovations. Among these innovations, innovations by: marketing through souvenirs and annual-get-togethers product through Internet services processes through Information Management Systems (IMS), and organisation through student leadership were most utilised to descending extent. Furthermore, the study identified marketing and organisation innovation to have the highest effects on investment returns. However, process and product innovation showed a weak and moderate effect on investment returns because management hastily implemented these services without understanding the consequences it has on investment returns in the long run.

Practical implications

The moderate effect of product and process innovation on student housing investment can be a predictor for future student housing investment innovation strategies for new entrants as they do not provide an immediate positive investment return. Key takeaways require management to incrementally implement these innovations and adopt space management practices that create opportunities for future product and process innovations in Ghana. Investors should capitalise on marketing and organisational innovations as the best innovation strategies that yield the highest returns in Ghana.

Social implications

Student housing investors should focus on emerging student preferences such as entertainment, improved building services and Information Communication to stimulate student housing selection intentions.

Originality/value

Innovation diffusion in student housing is understudied. The closest connection of innovation diffusion theory to product enhancement, marketing and managerial improvement is a strategic tool that facilitates efficiency and productivity in student housing investment.

Exploiting organisational vulnerabilities as dark knowledge: conceptual development from organisational fraud cases

Purpose

This paper aims to assert that knowledge of organisational weaknesses, vulnerabilities and compromise points (here termed “dark knowledge”), is just as critical to organisational integrity and hence, must also be managed in a conventional knowledge management sense. However, such dark knowledge is typically difficult to identify and accordingly, few studies have attempted to conceptualise this view.

Design/methodology/approach

Using a background of fraud diamond theory, the authors examine this dark knowledge using a case study analysis of fraud at a large Asia-Pacific telecommunications provider. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with the firm’s fraud unit.

Findings

The authors identify six components of dark knowledge, being artefactual knowledge, consequential knowledge, knowledge of opportunity, knowledge of experimentality, knowledge of identity and action and knowledge of alternativity.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to identify a knowledge type based on organisational compromises and vulnerabilities. The paper shows that accounts of organisational weakness can yet provide knowledge insights.

Organizational Capital: A Resource for Changing and Performing in Public Administrations

The aim of this study was to deepen our knowledge about the role played by organizational capital (OC) among public administration (PA) agencies. A questionnaire was administered to a gender-balanced convenience sample of 270 workers of Italian PAs. First, confirmatory factor analysis was performed in order to examine the measurement model. Second, a SEM model was performed, confirming that OC was both directly and indirectly positively related to performance, through the mediation of innovation. OC was also positively related to innovation through the mediation of clarity about change. Overall, the results supported the hypothesized model, providing initial evidence on the pivotal role OC plays, and especially for PA agencies, on organizational innovation and performance. The limits and practical implications of these results are discussed.

By the Book or Out of the Box? Top Decision Maker Cognitive Style, Gender, and Firm Absorptive Capacity

Despite scholars’ early emphasis on the role people play in fostering firms’ absorptive capacity (AC), research has not deeply explored the individual-level antecedents of this important capability. We draw on adaptive-innovative theory to explain how top decision makers’ cognitive styles can influence the degree to which their firms develop AC. Top decision makers who have high adaptive cognitive style prefer to adhere to existing norms, follow established procedures, and rely on current knowledge, and we argue that these attributes will strengthen those dimensions of AC based on firms’ existing knowledge and knowledge-assimilation abilities. Top decision makers who have high innovative cognitive style are more likely to reframe information, experiment with new problem-solving approaches, and take risks by violating norms, and we argue that these attributes may strengthen those dimensions of AC based on firms’ acquisition of new knowledge and the assimilation of knowledge throughout the firm. We also argue that gender differences may moderate these effects. Empirical results support our hypotheses.

Overcoming knowledge barriers to health care through continuous learning

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of continuous learning and the mitigation or elimination of knowledge barriers affecting information technology (IT) assimilation in the health-care sector. Most of the problems with IT assimilations stem from a poor understanding of the nature of suitable information, the lack of trust, cultural differences, the lack of appropriate training and hierarchical bureaucratic structures and procedures. To overcome these barriers, this study provides evidence that a continuous learning process can play a part in overcoming some of the obstacles to the assimilation of IT.

Design/methodology/approach

This study investigates how a continuous learning environment can counteract the presence of knowledge barriers, and, along with such an environment, can, in turn, facilitate IT assimilation. The study uses ADANCO 2.0.1 Professional for Windows and involves the collection and analysis of data provided by 210 health-care end users.

Findings

The study provides evidence in support of the proposition that continuous learning may facilitate the assimilation of IT by health-care end users through the mitigation of knowledge barriers (e.g. lack of trust or resistance to change). The mitigation of these barriers requires the gathering and utilization of new knowledge and knowledge structures. The results support the hypothesis that one way in which this can be achieved is through continuous learning (i.e. through assessing the situation, consulting experts, seeking feedback and tracking progress).

Research limitations/implications

A limitation of the study is the relatively simple statistical method that has been used for the analysis. However, the results provided here will serve as a preliminary basis for more sophisticated analysis which is currently underway.

Practical implications

The study provides useful insights into ways of using continuous learning to facilitate IT assimilation by end users in the health-care domain. This can be of use to hospitals seeking to implement end user IT technologies and, in particular, telemedicine technologies. It can also be used to develop awareness of knowledge barriers and possible approaches to mitigate the effects of such barriers. Such an awareness can assist hospital staff in finding creative solutions for using technology tools. This potentially augments the ability of hospital staff to work with patients and carers, encouraging them to take initiative (make choices and solve problems relevant to them). This, in turn, allows hospitals to avoid negative and thus de-motivating experiences involving themselves and their end users (patients) and improving IT assimilation. This is liable to lead to improved morale and improved assimilation of IT by end users (patients).

Social implications

As ICT systems and services should entail participation of a wide range of users, developers and stakeholders, including medical doctors, nurses, social workers, patients and programmers and interaction designers, the study provides useful social implication for health management and people well-being.

Originality/value

The paper contributes to a better understanding of the nature and impacts of continuous learning. Although previous studies in the field of knowledge management have shown that knowledge management procedures and routines can provide support to IT assimilation, few studies, if any, have explored the relationship between continuous learning and IT assimilation with particular emphasis on knowledge barriers in the health-care domain.

Organizational social capital, resilience and innovation validation of a theoretical model for specialized workers

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to understand the interactions and their cause/effect consequences of three aspects present inside organizational realities, namely, organizational social capital (OSC), worker resilience and innovation derived from the workers.

Design/methodology/approach

A cross-sectional study for analyzing the subjects was chosen. As a quantitative research approach, after the theoretical review, two possibilities were hypothesized for how they act as a system. In order to verify the hypotheses, the authors chose the structural equation model, a suitable instrument for this analysis, as a mathematical tool.

Findings

The results show that OSC is a mediator between resilience and innovation in the organizational dynamics. This suggests that workers’ resilience need OSC, acting as the mediator, to improve their level of innovation capacity.

Research limitations/implications

The study gives information at a specific point in time. Follow-up studies are needed to understand the phenomena’s transformation, and no distinction was made between exploratory and exploitative innovation. More empirical studies should be carried out to enhance its understanding.

Practical implications

These findings can help organizations deal better with these resources to reach their goals because the first, as stated in the purpose, is the amalgamated goodwill necessary for individuals to work together; the second is workers’ capacity to bounce back; and the last is the creativity inherent in people. All of which are significant for an enterprise thrive in its market.

Originality/value

The cited dynamic has few studies, and this work provides evidence about its existence and magnitude, shedding light on a critical factors’ relationship net, especially for enterprises based on the creativity of their workers.

Overcoming counter-knowledge through telemedicine communication technologies

Purpose Knowledge acquired from sources of unverified information such as gossip, partial truths or lies, in this paper it is termed as "counter-knowledge." The purpose of this paper is to explore this topic through an exploration of the links between a Hospital-in-the-Home Units (HHUs) learning process (LP), counter-knowledge, and the utilization of communication technologies. The following two questions are addressed: Does the reduction of counter-knowledge result in the utilization of communication technologies? Does the development of counter-knowledge hinder the LP? Design/methodology/approach This paper examines the relevance of communication technologies to the exploration and exploitation of knowledge for 252 patients of a (HHU) within a Spanish regional hospital. The data collected was analyzed using the PLS-Graph. Findings To HHU managers, this study offers a set of guidelines to assist in their gaining an understanding of the role of counter-knowledge in organizational LPs and the potential contribution of communication technologies. Our findings support the proposition that the negative effects of counter-knowledge can be mitigated by using communication technologies. Originality/value It is argued in this paper that counter-knowledge may play a variety of different roles in the implementation of LPs. Specifically, the assignment of communication technologies to homecare units has given them the means to filter counter-knowledge and prevent users from any possible problems caused by such counter-knowledge.

Toward Science-Based Design in Organization Development

Herbert Simon once suggested that the social sciences are actually the hard sciences due to the enormous complexity and interconnectedness of the elements within social systems. This insight is also critical in understanding the nature of change and development of large organizational systems. Adopting a science-based design approach, the authors place emphasis on the importance of developing construction principles and design rules for the implementation of large-scale organization development (OD) interventions. The empirical part of the article draws on several case studies of OD projects that employ the methods of circular redesign. The first case illustrates how implementation may fail as a result of a lack of awareness of the complexity of OD implementation and experimentation processes. The second case suggests that a coherent set of principles and rules can provide a common framework and language for scholars, managers, and consultants working together in large-scale organizational change projects.

Knowledge Management for Healthcare: Investigating Practices that Drive Performance

Knowledge management (KM) is considered an important intervention in improving health care services. KM facilitates the transfer of existing knowledge and the development of new knowledge in hospitals. This research focuses on investigating the relationship between KM practices and performance in selected hospitals in Kuwait, exemplified by perceived productivity and quality. Survey data were collected from 277 doctors working in public and private hospitals in Kuwait. As predicted by previous studies, the doctors who responded to this research perceived good KM practices to have positive correlations with the productivity and quality of hospitals. Multiple regression analysis demonstrated a significant predictive power of knowledge capturing practices in predicting productivity and quality of hospitals. Knowledge sharing practices showed no significant predictive power in the model, and knowledge generating practices showed a slight prediction power.

Managing Knowledge and Managing Knowledge Work: What we know and what the Future holds

In this paper we review the recent IS literature on knowledge and consider different assumptions that underpin different approaches to this broad research area. In doing this we contrast those who focus on knowledge management with those who focus on knowing as practice and examine how contexts, processes and purposes need to be considered whichever approach to knowledge one is adopting. We also identify how recent IT developments, especially in relation to social software and the digitization of everything, are presenting new opportunities (and challenges) for how organizations can manage both knowledge and knowledge work. This presents IS scholars with new research agendas for examining and understanding the relationships between technology, organization and society.

Improving quality of service of home healthcare units with health information technologies

Deployment of health information technologies (HITs) provides home care units with the means to generate improvements in accuracy and timeliness of information required to meet dynamic patient demands and provide high quality patient care. Increasing availability of information can also facilitate organisational learning, which leads to the invocation of processes that result in improved responses and decisions. This study examined crucial links between HITs and quality of service provided through an empirical investigation of 252 patients in a hospital-in-the-home unit (HHU) in a Spanish regional hospital. The study sought to test the relationship between HITs and the quality of service using factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) to investigate how HITs mediate effects of organisational learning on quality of service. Findings support the notion that the relationship between organisational learning and quality of service can be mediated by HITs. This study provides HHU managers with guidelines for understanding the role of organisational learning processes with respect to HITs and quality of service.

Towards a Theory of Organizational Information Services

The use of information technology (IT) in organizations has undergone dramatic changes during the past 30 years. As a result, it has become increasingly common to adopt services rather than traditional systems perspective to more accurately capture contemporary practices. There is, however, a lack of theories that can help us understand, assess, and design information services in organizational contexts. On this backdrop, we combine general notions of information processing options and requirements to outline a contingency theory of organizational use of information services. The theory suggests that information services are configurations of heterogeneous information processing capabilities; these services are evoked by organizational actors to help execute tasks, and evoking different configurations may lead to equally satisfactory outcomes. The theory distinguishes between four types of services computational, adaptive, networking, and collaborative services, and it suggests that organizational actors need portfolios of information services that are suited to the equivocality and uncertainty profile of the information processing they face. The paper defines four types of services and how they relate to information processing requirements; it applies the theory to a study of information services in response to vehicle policing; and it outlines how the theory relates to standardization and unintended consequences of information services. We conclude by discussing the theory and its implications for research and practice.

The Political Lacuna in Participatory Systems Design

This paper critiques three prominent information systems (IS) contributions to the development of social (work) systems, namely ETHICS, UTOPIA and Multiple Perspectives. They are based on the socio-technical Quality of Working Life and generally rely on systems design for improving working conditions by allowing employees to appreciate a holistic work experience, instead of being treated as a cog in the profit-making machinery of capitalism. However, this paper argues that ETHICS and Multiple Perspectives in fact shy away from the ideo-political differences that cause workplace conflict in the first place. Their pluralist means of resolving workplace conflicts through discussion and negotiation fail to problematize the colonizing or hegemonic influence of economic rationalism in obscuring the feasibility of alternative modes of workplace relations. They play down the asymmetrical power relations that perpetuate the exploitation of weaker stakeholders in real-life employment negotiations. Hence, political quietism in social IS approaches fail to acknowledge the ideological causes of conflict, that is the pursuit of profit at any cost, as opposed to a more sustainable and ethical approach to workplace relations. This paper presents a study of an organizational accounting IS system and uses it for illustrating the ideological roots of differences in employee–employer needs and priorities and revealing how reflexive decision makers are alienated when they attempt to distance themselves from the myopic ethos of economic rationalism. Despite these criticisms, the paper concludes on a relatively positive note. It argues that, since the Brundtland Commission report Our Common Future was released in 1987, there has been increased awareness that organizations cannot continue to exploit our resources (and ourselves) blatantly in the name of profit maximization. This process of redefinition opens the door for more realistic and politically challenging systems approaches.

Mission Impossible? Communicating and Sharing Knowledge via Information Technology

This paper critiques the perspective that information technology can play a central role in knowledge-sharing processes. Fundamentally, it suggests that the nature of knowledge itself makes it extremely difficult and that quite specific conditions are required for information technology-based knowledge sharing to occur successfully. The paper proceeds by criticizing the objectivist philosophy of knowledge, which typically underpins the literature advocating information technology-based knowledge management. The centre point of this critique involves questioning one of the foundational assumptions of the objectivist perspective, namely the dichotomy made between tacit and explicit knowledge. Instead, a ‘practice‘-based philosophy of knowledge is proposed that suggests that all knowledge has both tacit and explicit components, is to some extent embodied in human brains and bodies and is embedded in organizational routines, practices and contexts. These characteristics therefore suggest that the role of information technology systems in the sharing of knowledge is likely to be somewhat limited.

Practising Peer Review in Organizations: A Qualifier for Knowledge Dissemination and Legitimization

A key issue in many organizations is how to disseminate information in an effective way and, more importantly, how to make use of this information in order to create new knowledge. One way of addressing this problem is to focus on how information is socially transformed into knowledge. This includes how knowledge is handled in practice and how the knowledge produced is qualified as being something worth knowing and acting upon. Two well-established practices for doing this are the refereeing system and the peer review process. These are used in scientific communities as a means of validating and legitimating knowledge, for example by reviewing journal papers before publishing or project proposals before granting funds, etc. This paper argues that peer review is a useful concept when looking at knowledge creation and legitimization in organizations. The social meaning of peer review is to legitimize new knowledge by organizationally sanctioning it and thereby creating a platform for collective sense making. This paper uses an example from a field study in a pharmaceutical company in order to illustrate this argument. The study took place in a quality support department where the quality of health care products and processes was assessed. The organization had a need for fast and reliable updating of information that could influence how the production process of pharmaceuticals should be carried out. In order to cope with these problems the department established an ‘evaluation loop’, which shared several characteristics with the peer review process.