Knowledge Management for Competitive Advantage Within Commercial Banks in Kenya

Abstract

In the highly demanding business world today, an organization’s competitive edge almost wholly depends on how well it can manage and deploy its corporate assets. These assets can be categorized into tangible and intangible assets. Traditionally, tangible assets like plant, equipment, inventory and financial capital are considered the most fundamental corporate assets. Intangible assets play a very little or vague role in any organization regardless from which industry it comes from (Vorbeck, Heisig, Martin & Schutt, 2001). Generally, many organizations until today still downplay the importance of their intangible assets. However, despite managing and giving prime focus to all their tangible assets, organizations are still finding it very hard to gain the advantage to beat their competitors. Eventually, organizations have found out that tangible assets can only help them to a certain extent. It is now becoming clearer that organizations require a much broader range of resources to be able to compete and succeed in the current competitive market. This is shown by an increasing number of organizations giving more emphasis to their intangible assets, which was mostly left idle, unexplored and unmanaged (Vorbeck et al., 2001).