Governance of Knowledge-teams in MNC: The Case of HeidelbergCement

Recent streams in both the knowledge management literature and the MNC literature suggest the use of knowledge-teams for purposes of lateral knowledge integration and combination to stimulate innovation and organizational learning. While the use of knowledge-teams is widespread in MNCs, there is also raising concern in practice regarding costs and concrete strategic benefits of such teams. Using the case of a large MNC to analyse various types of knowledge-teams as a context for grounded theory development, this paper identifies contingency factors (strategic importance of knowledge and focus on knowledge creation vs. knowledge sharing) that influence the governance of knowledge teams.