A physical work environment for knowledge sharing in organisations

Knowledge sharing within the organisation is an important condition for successful innovation. Lots of organisational aspects have been identified to stimulate knowledge sharing, but this paper takes a different approach. It investigates the aspects of the physical work environment that help the knowledge sharing process, through an extensive content analysis of literature from very different research areas. The eight identified real estate aspects are then related to cooperative behaviour and activities that bring about the sharing of both explicit and tacit knowledge. The influencing mechanism turned out to distinguish between aspects that stimulate interaction and aspect that really provide a (tacit) knowledge-sharing environment. These are translated into managerial implications and the identification of many more lacunas