A knowledge management approach to organizational competitive advantage: Evidence from the food sector

This paper uses a comparative case study approach to investigate how two small Italian food producers manage their knowledge. The first company under consideration is mainly focused on marketing, while the second on the technology knowledge domain. This paper enriches the existing literature by documenting examples of how companies can successfully manage organizational knowledge on the basis of their relative knowledge domain. This research claims that not only knowledge domain but also innovation behavior seem to be the contingencies that mostly impact on knowledge management system features. In fact, the different combinations of the two variables have deeply different requirements in terms of knowledge management. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.