The evolutionary perspective of knowledge creation – A mathematical representation

Since knowledge and its strategic applications have now become a major source of competitive advantage for organizations, the lifeblood of organizations is to possess the capabilities for acquiring, creating, sharing, diffusing, utilizing, and storing knowledge among organizational members. Among the capabilities, knowledge creation is the major resource of organizational innovation and it, therefore, plays a more crucial role in developing a sustained competitive advantage for organizations, especially in a dynamic environment. Although numerous papers have studied the issue of knowledge creation, those papers focused on conceptualizing the process of knowledge creation and did not investigate the concrete problem of knowledge creation. In the current paper, a mathematical representation of knowledge creation based on an evolutionary perspective is used to understand: (1) if knowledge can be created; (2) how knowledge is created; (3) under what conditions knowledge can be created; (4) the partial effects of variables which affect the process of knowledge creation.