Three essays on customer network-based CRM in high-tech industry and a strategic adoption of knowledge management system from knowledge marketplace perspective

Abstract

Recent technological advancements create not only vast market opportunities but also threats to firms. In a frictionless market environment, competition becomes fierce due to lowered market barriers. Customer’s needs become much more unpredictable and complicated because of increased amount of information they can access, thereby providing them more bargaining power. In this turbulent market environment, a firm struggles to create and maintain its competitiveness to deal with aggressive rivals and unpredictable customers. Dynamic capability is necessary for a firm to survive in harsh market. For establishing dynamic capability, a firm should build up its differentiated resources to develop its unique product and service to keep its customers with rapidly changing needs and catch up with changing technology to compete with new rivals. Among those resources, organizational knowledge recently gains huge attention from academic scholars and business practitioners. Knowledge has not garnered much attention in the early twentieth primarily because it is created and used for production within a firm. It has never been thought to be a resource that consists of a firm’s competitiveness. Recently, majority of firms recognized the importance of knowledge and endeavored to identify, capture, store and disseminate valuable knowledge throughout them. Therefore, the efficient management of a firm’s knowledge has been the main theme in various fields. In this study, we conducted an analysis of knowledge management issues from two perspectives. First, I studied customer network as an essential knowledge for customer relationship management. Much of prior work on customer market emphasized individual characteristics for finding out loyal customers. More sophisticated and practical methods for knowing customers on an individual basis have been developed due to advancements in IT technology. Therefore, designing and offering a product based on a customer‘s needs can be actu...