In order to win the global race for innovation as a source for competitive advantage, many companies enter into any kind of business co-operation. Beyond intending to grow merely quantitatively, co-operation partners should target to commonly create new knowledge and to transfer knowledge as a basis for qualitative growth. This apparent deficiency of practitioners is compounded by a lack of theory and empirical research on intercultural knowledge transfer. This task becomes even more daunting, when co-operation partners transcend borders, and the knowledge transfer process becomes impacted by national cultures

The way the knowledge is transferred conditions or facilitates not only the understanding, but also the acceptance, the efficiency and its cognitive legitimation. Semantically, transfer means a process of direction, where normally the origin and destination is known, but what remain unknown are the influences of how the transfer takes place and its efficiency.

If the learning process is done by imitation and performed to please the formal requirements, this implies at best the adoption of new practice, a behavioural change achieved by single loop learning,  without any reflection, criticism, appreciation and, most important, application of new knowledge no real cognitive learning can flourish. In order to improve the efficiency in cross-cultural knowledge transfer the following steps should be conducted

More information? Contact: Lola Sanchez