Strategic contributions of game rooms to knowledge management: some prelimenary insights

Academics and practitioners have stressed the significance of managing knowledge in today's competitive environment. This has resulted in many efforts to increase knowledge exchange between organizational members. Much work so far has focused on the use of information technology as either a solution or enabler of knowledge management. While information technology enables easy exchange of explicit knowledge, its contributions to sharing tacit knowledge is restricted to connecting individuals via tools, such as e-mail and groupware. This research adds to the literature by reporting on a people-centered perspective for facilitating tacit knowledge exchange. The article describes an in-depth case study carried out to determine the role played by game rooms in the exchange of tacit knowledge. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.