دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی دانشگاه های شرکتی به عنوان ابزار مدیریت دانش - امرالد 2017

1. Introduction

In the last decades, continuous learning and lifelong education has been considered a key issue not only for policy makers but also for companies. Indeed, the capability to keep workforce reactive to challenging changes in markets and technologies is deemed vital for a sustainable business environment (Marquardt, 1996). This explains why Corporate Universities (CUs) have become a popular arrangement to facilitate business education and training, organizational learning, and circulation of knowledge inside a firm. Especially (but not only) used by large firms, CUs are now diffused in numerous countries and industries (Andresen and Lichtenberger, 2007; Guerci et al., 2010; Abel and Li, 2012; Antonelli et al., 2013; Ayuningtias, 2015). Although created for different reasons, usually they have similar goals, i.e.: systematic organization of human resources training, retaining employees and reducing negative effects of turnover, facilitating the introduction of fresh workforce, aligning competences around the company, and improving the sense of membership and loyalty of workers (Hearn, 2001).

7. Conclusion

A CU is both an increasingly important organizational setting for providing professional training to employees, and substantially a tool to manage knowledge effectively inside an organization. For this reason, as the paper highlights, employing a KM perspective to analyse CUs can help to understanding the nature and functioning of such structures, and provides useful suggestions for their management in real life cases.

Implications for research. An important lesson from the empirical analysis is that it is necessary to go deeper into the KM characteristics of CUs for understanding their key features and processes. So far, the literature has just connected CUs and KM in a generic way, while it is now necessary to use KM notions and concepts more thoroughly and punctually. Also, the topic of CUs provides a clear link between two logically related fields that are sometimes treated disjointedly, i.e. training and education on the one hand, and KM on the other hand. Future research should be devoted to test the interpretative capacity of the developed taxonomy, as well as to deepen the issues raised by the points discussed at the end of the previous section.