A FRAMEWORK FOR AVOIDING KNOWLEDGE LEAKAGE

In today’s competitive environments, the effective use of knowledge assets and resources helps companies, regardless the industry they belong to and their size, in responding to fast changing customer expectations, thus supporting vital operational and innovative activities. Consequently, knowledge management (hereafter, KM) has become increasingly important and is acquiring more and more attention from both researchers and managers. In the extant literature, empirical research exists underlying the importance of knowledge protection in order to enhance companies’ performance. Notwithstanding, still scant attention is paid to security issues by knowledge managers. As a consequence, an in-depth investigation of knowledge loss and knowledge protection issue should help knowledge managers in understanding how they can share and protect knowledge at the same time. Our main goal is the development of a KM framework for knowledge-intensive firms, aimed at identifying the main knowledge threats and the related defensive mechanisms that should be adopted. In order to develop the framework, we conducted a review of the extant literature, from which two main threats emerged, namely: employees’ turnover and collaboration with external actors. For each of them, we also found how knowledge-intensive firms can identify relevant knowledge and who possess it, and the related defensive mechanisms discussed to date.