Disclosing and Assessing the Knowledge Assets Roots of Organisational Value Creation Dynamics

In today’s fast changing and complex economic scenario, the importance of the traditional economic and production factors considered as the engine of company’s value creation dynamics is decreasing. In this regards, knowledge and resource based strategic management theories have argued that knowledge assets represent fundamental factors to lever on for acquiring sustainable competitive advantage. In the last decades many companies have paid attention on the implementation of management initiatives aimed to exploit their knowledge assets to support and drive organizational performance improvement. However, nevertheless the rich case record, it is still difficult to clearly assess how knowledge assets are engaged in company’s performance improvement. More specifically there is a need to better clarify: i) How are knowledge assets engaged, separately and as a cluster, in value creation dynamics? ii) How is it possible to identify knowledge assets which drive company’s value creation dynamics, taking into account mutual interactions among knowledge assets? iii) How is it possible to analyse, according to cause-and-effect mechanisms, how knowledge assets are dynamically involved in company’s performance objectives achievement? Answering these questions is particularly important, since it allows managers to define better focused knowledge assets management initiatives as well as to link knowledge assets to strategy planning, execution and achievement and better align investments in organizational knowledge capital for the greatest impact. The paper proposes and shows the application of a model for disclosing and assessing the organizational knowledge assets grounding the organization’s value creation dynamics, i.e. the knowledge asset value drivers. The model allows to visualise and evaluate the cause-and-effect relationships among the components of an organization’s strategy and particularly the links between knowledge assets and strategic objectives. The model is based on the use of specific methods adopted from the field of decision support systems, i.e. multicriteria decision methods and the system theory