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****Submission Deadline Extension to July 1, 2020 due to the 
Unprecedented Situation***
*

**

*Journal of International Management – Journal of Knowledge 
ManagementSpecial Issue Proposal*

*_Joint Call for Papers_*

*Knowledge Management in Innovative or Complex Inter-Organizational 
Arrangements: How to Effectively Share, Transfer, Integrate and Apply 
Dispersed Knowledge*

*_Guest Editors Teams _*

*/Journal of International Management/*


*Prof. Manlio Del Giudice*/(Lead Guest Editor)/, University of Rome 
“Link Campus”, ITALY, [log in to unmask] 
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
*Prof. Masaaki Kotabe*, Temple University, USA, [log in to unmask] 
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
*Prof. Shlomo Tarba*, University of Birmingham, UK, [log in to unmask] 
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
*Prof. Arvind Malhotra*, The University of North Carolina at Chapel 
Hill, USA, [log in to unmask] 
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
*Prof. Fábio Lotti Oliva*, University of São Paulo, BRAZIL, 
[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>

*/Journal of Knowledge Management /*

*Prof. Masaaki Kotabe */(Lead Guest Editor)/, Temple University, USA, 
[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
*Prof. Fábio Lotti Oliva*, University of São Paulo, BRAZIL, 
[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
*Prof. Ke Rong*, Tsinghua University, CHINA, [log in to unmask] 
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

The complexity of the business environment has significantly increased 
over time. Globalization, technological innovation, new international 
financial flows, climate change, and social change are some of the main 
elements present in the administrative equation imposed on current 
managers (Merritt, 1974; Chakravarthy, 1997; Weber and Tarba, 2014). 
Recently, the corporate world has incorporated the acronym VUCA 
(volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) that expresses the 
speed of change, the unpredictability of events, the multiplicity of 
forces, and various ways of seeing reality that respectively best 
describe the environment. (Bennis and Nanus, 1985).

With the most volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous business 
environment, organizations need to look for denser strategic management 
tools to cope with constant change (Ambrosini and Bowman, 2009; Oliva et 
al., 2018). One of the administrative responses is the adoption of new 
organizational structures that can make organizations more efficient and 
effective in the face of administrative trends such as open innovation, 
digital transformation and global presence (Dyer and Singh, 1998; 
Matricano et al., 2019).

A number of companies work in different inter-organizational 
arrangements establishing transactions that involve sharing strategies, 
customers, suppliers, material resources, financial resources and other 
elements of common value to develop products and services. These 
inter-organizational arrangements seek to make the organizations 
involved more agile to better meet market demands in a more volatile, 
uncertain, complex and ambiguous business environment. Developing 
capabilities that enable you to read the changing demands of the 
business environment, propose internal change to prepare the 
organization, and develop products and services that meet the changing 
demands are the desired organizational or inter-organizational dynamic 
capabilities in this new context (Teece, Pisano and Shuen, 1997; 
Kothari, Kotabe and Murphy, 2013, Del Giudice and Maggioni, 2014; 
Sarala, Cooper, Junni and Tarba, 2016).

An intriguing point is to understand how these new inter-organizational 
arrangements promote knowledge management. Considering the knowledge 
management process as a set of stages of knowledge definition, 
acquisition, dissemination, storage, application and evaluation, it is 
important to understand how organizations work at each stage of 
knowledge management to develop new products, in product production, 
customer service or product distribution in the local and international 
context.

In this context, considering the multinational companies (MNCs) as an 
example of analysis, knowledge management (KM) has become one of the 
most important factor to allow continuous value creation (Del Giudice 
and Maggioni, 2014), improve customer values (Xue, 2017) and increase 
innovativeness (Jiménez-Jiménez, Martínez-Costa and Sanz-Valle, 2014), 
thus improving overall firm performances. This forced MNCs to rethink 
the role of KM within the organization, usually bringing it out of its 
functional research and development (R&D) silo with the aim at 
integrating it into the firm intra- and inter-organizational processes 
(Mudambi, 2002). As a consequence, the domain of knowledge management 
started to attract higher scholarly interest from the well-established 
international business stream of literature (e.g. Buckley, 2002), thus 
cross fertilizing research in the two fields of interest.

Although an effort has been directed to study the role of knowledge in 
the internationalization process (e.g. Martin and Salomon, 2003), the 
knowledge transfer among and across networks (Tallman and Chacar, 2011; 
Del Giudice, Maggioni & Carayannis, 2017) and the reverse knowledge 
transfer (RKT) between foreign subsidiary and HQ (e.g. Mudambi, 
Piscitello & Rabbiosi, 2014) many research gaps still exist. For 
example, we still know very little about the selection and application 
of specific KM processes that are more effective to support the 
international expansion (i.e. knowledge sourcing, transferring and 
exploiting) as well as the KM tools that are more useful for the 
recombination of external and internal organizational knowledge, thus 
improving the overall management of cross cultural knowledge that 
resides in culturally different host countries in which MNCs operate, 
that is nowadays crucial in the international arena.

Taking startups and their inter-organizational relationships as an 
example, considering that they are temporary organizations whose 
business model is based on the conception of innovation, the proposition 
of a solution that transforms a problem, and the scalability that is 
configured in the broad offer to society, it is found that they are 
agile organizations that generate knowledge and are dependent on 
knowledge to play their transformative role (Oliva and Kotabe, 2019).In 
this sense, startups use the concept of open innovation to achieve their 
growth goals and thus, the effectiveness of dispersed knowledge 
management is a decisive factor (Spender et al., 2017). In the 
international context, the born global startups are highly demanding of 
knowledge about the local markets where they will operate, the 
compliance with the various legislations and the competences of 
potential innovation partner suppliers (Knight and Cavusgil, 2004; 
Cavusgil and Knight,2015; Yoon and Hughes, 2016).

A third example to consider is the importance of knowledge management in 
supply chains. Supply chain management has assumed a leading operations 
strategy position in the manufacturing and services sectors (Samuel, 
Goury, Gunasekaran and Spalanzani, 2011). Knowledge sharing increases 
the potential for innovation of the agents involved, production of 
higher quality products, cost reduction in general (Cheng and Fu, 2013). 
There are some theoretical gaps regarding the accumulation of knowledge 
and the problems of obsolescence of knowledge in production chains 
(Marra, Ho and Edwards, 2012).

_Recommended areas of research_

This is a special issue jointly organized by Journal of Knowledge 
Management and Journal of International Management, and urges you to 
develop research on various topics related to the central theme, 
knowledge management in various inter-organizational arrangements in the 
national and international contexts. Emblematic case studies, action 
research in large corporations, research in multinational firms, 
sectoral quantitative research, research in inter-organizational 
networks, qualitative and quantitative research in the national or 
international context are some examples. We welcome conceptual and 
empirical papers using a diverse range of methods that address topics 
such as the indicative themes outlined below:

*General topics:*

·Knowledge management in different inter-organizational arrangements

·Knowledge management in born global startups

·The cultural, social, institutional, geographical or economic 
dimensions in knowledge management in international inter-organizational 
arrangements

·Knowledge management in agile organizations

·Knowledge management in projects with open innovation

·Barriers, critical success factors and best practices in knowledge 
management in inter-organizational arrangements

·Dispersed knowledge management in product development in 
inter-organizational arrangements

·The role of the leading knowledge management company in the different 
inter-organizational arrangements

·Dynamic capabilities in knowledge management in different 
inter-organizational arrangements

·The stages of knowledge management in different inter-organizational 
arrangements

·Risk analysis in knowledge management in different inter-organizational 
arrangements

·Ethical dilemmas in knowledge management in different 
inter-organizational arrangements

·The complexity of knowledge management in new product development, 
product production, customer service or product distribution in the 
local and international context

*Specific topics:*

·Which are the key factors and organizationalantecedents that drive 
knowledge sharing, seeking and transfer in Inter-Organizational 
Arrangements?

·How R&D internationalization choices may be rethought in the light of 
the development of a systematic firm KM orientation?

·Which KM tools should be developed by knowledge-intensive enterprises 
(KIEs) to transfer and integrate cross cultural knowledge?

·How do firms manage ownership of intellectual property in 
inter-organizational arrangements?

·How the management of internal and external organizational knowledge 
can be exploited to develop sustainable competitive advantages?

·Which is the link among internationalization, reverse knowledge 
transfer, social capital and organizational innovation within MNCs?

·How knowledge management affects the process of internationalization of 
emerging markets multinational companies (EMNCs)?

·How the sourcing of external global knowledge (i.e. from global 
suppliers or from specialised “innomediaries”) impact the innovation 
performance of MNCs?

·How MNCs develop KM tools or processes to “protect” or “hide” relevant 
knowledge from competitors?

·How firms manage the dispersed nature of knowledge for product 
development and how a leader firm would evolve in such an arrangement?

·What is the role of subsidiaries in managing spatially separate 
knowledge sources within and across MNC organizational boundaries?

_Important deadlines_

Manuscript submission deadline: *July 1, 2020* (earlier submission is 
highly encouraged);

Publication expected: by mid-2021

_Author guidelines, submission and review process_

/This call for papers has been jointly presented on both the Journal of 
International Management (JIM) and in the Journal of Knowledge 
Management (JKM), but with two different teams of Guest Editors. The 
aims and the scope of this first Joint Call for Papers is to collect, on 
the two respective journals, a premiere and top quality set of the most 
cutting-edge studies and researches focusing on crucial aspects of 
knowledge management in international contexts. Nevertheless, even if 
the Call for Papers is the same on the two journals, papers dealing more 
specifically with formal strategies of knowledge management in national 
or international based contexts should be addressed for submission to 
the JKM, while papers involving international dimensions, including 
cultural, institutional, geographic, and economic (e.g. developed 
country vs developing country), should be instead submitted to the JIM. 
Submitted papers which will be considered out of fit for one journal, 
may be addressed from the Lead Guest Editor to the other journal, if the 
topics are reputed more fitting with its core aims and scope./

Manuscripts for both the Journal of International Management and the 
Journal of Knowledge Management are subject to a double-blind peer 
review process. To format the manuscripts, prospective authors are 
invited to consult the Journal’s guideline, which can be retrieved from 
the respective webpages:

Journal of International Management: 
https://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-international-management/1075-4253/guide-for-authors;

Journal of Knowledge Management: 
http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=jkmb

Manuscripts should be submitted through these web pages. Authors should 
select the special issue title from the drop-down menu while submitting 
online, in order to be considered for this special issue. Informal 
enquiries are valued, and can be directed to the guest editors.

Journal of International Management:

https://www.evise.com/profile/#/INTMAN/login

Journal of Knowledge Management:

https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jkm

__

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