Emerging Technologies: Factors Influencing Knowledge Sharing

Abstract

As advances in emerging technologies continue to transform the business landscape, knowledge sharing will become increasingly important to leveraging the unique core competencies of organizations so as to gain a competitive advantage. Despite emerging technologies being so popular in news and media publications, knowledge sharing remains an area of research that is under-researched in the emerging technologies context. This research aims to identify the barriers and factors to knowledge sharing within an emerging technology context. A comprehensive in-depth interview was conducted with 38 professionals working in 5 organizations engaged in the field of emerging technologies in order to arrive at the findings discussed in this paper. Based on the analysis of the surveys, we found that there are six main factors driving the need for sharing knowledge. The six factors are: regular cadence, integrating expertise from different teams, diversity-inclusive social environment, Interconnected platforms that are accessible to all, a regular update schedule that needs to be followed, to create points of contact within different departments of an organization in order to facilitate sharing. It is important to note that the distribution and use of knowledge in organizations is dependent on the interactions between individuals.