A dynamic taxonomy for managing knowledge assets

In the last decade, knowledge asset management has attracted great attention in both academia and in business. Many researchers have used various perspectives to propose taxonomies for classifying knowledge assets. As knowledge assets never change their type once they have been classified, we argue that these taxonomies should be regarded as “static”. This is mainly because existing taxonomies classify knowledge assets by their peculiarities rather than by their environmental factors.Unlike previous studies, this study proposes a “dynamic” taxonomy, using two dimensions: “impacts on sustainability of competitive advantage (SCA)” and “impacts on appropriability”. This classifies a firm's knowledge assets into four types: core knowledge assets, dynamic knowledge assets, supportive knowledge assets and low-value knowledge assets. The proposed taxonomy possesses two main characteristics: one is of it being dynamic and the other is its alignment with strategy.To elaborate this taxonomy, several examples related to the four types of knowledge assets are presented and several propositions are introduced in this study.