| Summary: | Knowledge integration is an emerging discipline in organizational science where the central
proposition is that the increasing complexity of products and services being developed and
delivered, means that the knowledge required for production is increasingly specialized, varied
(multi-disciplinary) and distributed across the organization’s internal boundaries, and as a result
there is a need for organizations to continuously gather their knowledge resources in order to
maintain their ability to innovate, and to sustain their competitive position in the market. In
addition, the increasing scale and scope of organizational arrangements, such as multinational
partnerships or multi-tiered prime-supplier arrangements commonly encountered in the
aerospace, automotive and other complex product development industries, also give rise to
environments of dispersed knowledge resources, thus necessitating the subsequent integration of
this knowledge across external boundaries spanning large-scale organizational networks.
Knowledge integration in this context is done through a process of transferring knowledge from
multiple sources in the organizational network to where it is needed, combining it with existing
knowledge, before it can be applied to accomplish complex tasks and to solve major problems.
The primary purpose of this paper is to define the powerful concept of knowledge integration in
large-scale organizational networks using an extensive review of the pertinent literature on
knowledge in organizations. An operational definition for knowledge integration is also
proposed, followed by a systematic identification and classification of the different strategies,
practices, channels and mechanisms for integrating different types of knowledge across a
multitude of organizational boundaries and environments.
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