Albion Fabric Employees: Sources of internal knowledge to create competitive advantage.

Sources of knowledge for organisation are from many channels mainly internal and external. Both sources need to be manipulated and exploited for business processes to be redefined so that these activities will create competitive advantage for an organisation.
My focus here is on internal sources of knowledge. In the case of Albion Fabrics, from the sociological viewpoint, I believe apart from competitors and external forces, employees of Albion Fabrics are the major knowledge and information sources. Within its many activities Albion Fabrics may capture both information and knowledge from its competitors and external organisations but the knowledge capturing process will be a more added value activity to the customer and organisation because the knowledge itself is in essence “information” as well as information on “how” the information is going to be beneficial to the strategic activities that will bring competitive advantage to Albion Fabrics.

Many strategic activities involved in creating knowledge have been practically linked to real differentiation in the marketplace. For example Yli-Renko et al. (2001) have produced research findings that indicate that knowledge acquisition and creation is strongly correlated with knowledge exploitation for competitive advantage (Yli-Renko et al. 2001). This means that Albion Fabrics should move forward in a purposeful manner as its objective to capture knowledge with the potential for exploitation that will help gain its competitive advantage. "AF" needs to focus on capturing knowledge that is crucial in its current and future needs so that it will harness methods of sustaining its competitiveness edge from strategic point of view.

Employees of "AF "come from diverse backgrounds, experiences and ways of working and abilities. This diversity brings potential to generation of strategic methods of achieving this organisation’s objectives. Collaboration of "AF" employees will begin the process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. We learnt that knowledge sharing and "learning" is created when tacit knowledge is transformed into explicit knowledge. Employees will learn from the socialising activities with each other. Learnt practices and methods have good potential of moving towards creating competitive advantage. I speculate that AF will need to create better methods of engaging its employees in socialising and collaboration as one of its strategic objectives. I shall focus on how this and other objectives will be met for AF in my later posts.

Reference:
Yli-Renko, H., Autio, E., & Sapienza, H.J. (2001). Social capital, knowledge acquisitions, and knowledge exploitation in young technology-based firms. Strategic Management Journal, 22 (6), 587-613.