Breakthrough Research on Knowledge Transfer Reveals Five Proven Methods for Making Knowledge Sharing a Reality-Which are Right for Your Company? While external knowledge-about customers, about competitors-is critical, it rarely provides a competitive edge for companies because such information is equally available to everyone. But internal "know-how" that is unique to a specific company-how to introduce a new drug into the diabetes market, how to decrease assembly time in an automobile plant-is the stuff of which sustained competitive advantage is made. Nancy Dixon, an expert in the field of organizational learning, calls this knowledge borne of experience "common knowledge," and argues that in order to get beyond talking about knowledgemanagement to actually doing it, companies must first recognize that all knowledge is not created-and therefore can't be shared-equally. Creating successful knowledge transfer systems, Dixon argues, requires matching the type of...