ON KNOWLEDGE SHARING PATTERNS AMONG RIVAL FIRMS : THE CASE OF KNOWLEDGE ON SAFETY

Abstract

Empirical evidences give support to the fact that rival firms do share knowledgeand that this may affect firm and industry performance. Knowledge has a publicgood character and therefore a piece of knowledge may be useful to differentagents simultaneously while costing zero extra cost of production. Knowledgemight become a public - or at least collective - good though only if the owner ofthe knowledge accepts to disclose it. Disclosure, as we shall expect, and as foundby von Hippel ( 1987) for instance, depends on whether the piece of knowledgeis expected to give a competitive advantage over rivals. Clearly, a piece ofknowledge that brings more benefits to the firm when kept secret rather thandisclosed will be protected or kept in secrecy. Conversely, we would expect firmsnot to be reluctant to disclose pieces of knowledge that are not associated withtheir competitive advantages. It is indeed what von Hippel (1987) or Schrader(1991) find : engineers at rival firms are not reluctant to share knowledge thatis not competitive.The motivation of this paper is to examine whether firms do effectively shareknowledge that is not competitive, hence to verify whether not being reluctantto share certainly imply effective sharing. In order to examine this question,we have conducted an empirical study of knowledge sharing practices relativeto safety issues in the chemical industry. We have chosen safety knowledgebecause precisely safety is considered by firms in the chemical industry to benotcompetitive. Therefore they are typically notreluctantto discloseknowledgeon safety issues. Then, we have chosen to study the chemical industry because itis an industry that is typically concerned with safety issues and that cover manydifferent sectors, such that comparisons could be made. More precisely, however,we focused our empirical investigation on the chlorine industry. The reasonis that when first interviewing employees in different sectors of the chemicalindustry, it appeared to us the following paradoxical outcome : 1) on the onehand, employees of any sector of the chemical industry declare that they are notreluctant to disclose knowledge on safety; and 2) on the other hand, we quicklyacquired the sensation that sharing was indeed covering different realities, andthat in that respect, while all practising sharing in some sense, all sectors of the1

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