The key to sharing knowledge and technology? People!

It’s no secret that the effective transferring of information, resources, and best practices throughout an organization benefits everyone, whether it involves interdepartmental cooperation on a project, or simply two coworkers tackling a challenge over a cup of coffee. But what happens when your organization is global, and a visit to a coworker’s office might involve a flight overseas, and the importance of the effective transfer of ideas and employee skillsets must be weighed against the potential incurred costs?

To provide insight on how multinational firms can address these complexities, I’m pleased to introduce Christian Stadler with the Warwick Business School whose study, “Transferring knowledge by transferring individuals: Innovative technology usage and organizational performance in multi-unit firms,” is selected for publication in the INFORMS journal Organization Science.

Sending around experienced personal is an expensive thing to do and companies often tend to prefer either smaller assignments and people on training, maybe do best practice sharing. But our research suggests that it does make sense to invest in moving around individual engineers or individual experts.

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