The idea of Knowledge Stocks and Flows just turned 25 years old this month! Considering how much this is highlighted in social business, collaboration, the collaborative economy, self-management and other topics today, we should celebrate.
I think the first paper that I can find that suggests this idea was Dierickx & Cool (INSEAD) in December 1989, as “Asset Stock Accumulation and Sustainability of Competitive Advantage“, in Management Science, Vol. 35, No. 12
This later is reprised in David Deeds & Donna DeCarolis (1999) paper “The Impact of Stocks and Flows of Organizational Knowledge on Firm Performance: An Empirical Investigation of the Biotechnology Industry“, in Entrepreneurship Faculty Publications. Paper 4, of the Univ. of St Thomas, Minnesota
Then again by Morris, Snell and Depak of Cornell (2005), “An Architectural Approach to Managing Knowledge Stocks and Flows: Implications for Reinventing the HR Function”
And more recently raised by John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison in their book, The Power of Pull (2012).
To go even further back, one might argue that Friedrich Hayek’s seminal work, The Use of Knowledge, published in 1945 in the American Economic Review, precedes all these, making knowledge flows about 60 years old!
I’ve bundled links to some of these papers here: https://bitly.com/bundles/rawnshah/l
The Reconnected Organization 