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2007 Annual International CHRIE Conference & Exposition
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Moreover, several authors (e.g. Alavi and Leidner, 2001) also advocate that in order to engage in NPD
processes, it is not only important to gather a significant amount of relevant knowledge, but it is also important that
a firm has an ability to effectively apply the existing knowledge to create new knowledge. This is because a firm’s
innovation capability heavily depends on its organisational learning and organisational knowledge management
processes (Albino et al., 2001). In other words, the literature broadly recognizes that a critical component of
innovative firms’ capabilities is the capacity of an organization to expose “receptors” to the environment in order to
collect, “absorb” and exploit external knowledge. Cohen and Levinthal (1990) introduced the concept of “absorptive
capacity” to suggest the idea that the ability to evaluate and utilize outside knowledge is largely a function of the
level of prior related knowledge. The firm’s absorptive capacity depends on the individuals standing at the interface
between the firm and its external environment as well as at the interface between subunits within the firm (e.g.
cross-functional roles, boundary spanning, gate-keeping roles). In the knowledge management field, von Krogh et
al. (2000) used the term “knowledge activists”, as “people who trigger and coordinate knowledge-creation
processes” for describing the same concept. Star (1989) described boundary objects as objects that work to establish
a shared context that “seats in the middle”. “Effective” boundary objects (Carlile, 2001) facilitate knowledge
management processes by: 1) establishing a shared syntax or language for individuals to represent their knowledge,
2) providing a concrete means for individuals to specify and learn about their differences and dependencies across a
given boundary, 3) facilitating a process where individuals can jointly transform their knowledge.
Overall, it becomes evident that all knowledge management creation modes (as identified by the spiral
model of Nonaka) are indispensable and necessary for informing and enabling NPD processes. In particular,
according to the spiral model, new organisational knowledge is created through four interplay processes between
explicit and implicit knowledge: a) socialisation (occurring by working in the same environment or task, spending
time together, informal social meetings) which yields new tacit knowledge through information interaction exchange
of tacit knowledge between individuals from the internal and external environment of a firm; b) externalisation is the
act of codifying or converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge occurring in more formal interactions (e.g.
expert interviews, research-surveys); c) combination which involve the making of sense and new knowledge through
the relation and synthesise of previously unrelated knowledge; and d) internationalisation reflecting the process (e.g.
learn by doing, simulation etc) of absorbing explicit knowledge and creating new individually held tacit knowledge.
In addition, Andriani and Hall (2002) identified three more knowledge management processes adding to the four
well-known basic processes that are very much related to the knowledge management processes for firms’ clusters
and their innovation capability: “locating and acquiring external explicit knowledge new to the group”, “locating
and acquiring external tacit knowledge new to the group” and “inventing knowledge new to the group”.
On the contrary, firms’ failure to utilize, absorb and create new knowledge leads to the continuous high
failure rates of new products, which are mainly attributed to (Cooper et al. 1994): the lack of an efficient
development process (De Bretani, 1991; Drew, 1995; Edgett, 1994); the lack of a market understanding and
orientation (Gronroos, 1994; Martin and Horne, 1995); and the focus of the majority of NPD models to the design of
successful service encounters as opposed to delivering experiences (e.g. Menor et al. 2002). The latter factor is
critically important in the tourism industry and the role of tourism clusters at destinations. This is because tourists
perceive and evaluate their tourism experiences at the destination as a gestalt and not as a collection of isolated
service transaction with the different and multiple tourism suppliers. As a result, it becomes evident that the
importance of tourism clusters to identify, share and use tourism intelligence is critical in order not only to become
market oriented but also to continually create and deliver memorable holistic experiences to their visitors. Other
researchers also stress as major limitations of NPD processes the non-existent integration and communication
between firms’ departments and firms’ customers and partners (Sigala and Chalkiti, 2007; Alam and Perry, 2002). In
this vein, in order to take a more active role in NDP processes, tourism clusters should aim at facilitating and
boosting knowledge collection, transfer, utilization and creation amongst their networks and members. Fostering
knowledge exchange amongst firms’ networks is a critical task of tourism clusters, since previous studies (e.g.
Tallman and Jenkins, 2002) also showed that the success of some geographical clusters is tied to the interaction of
member firms that evolved in some loosely defined manner, but without prior planning.
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