Knowledge Management and Sustainable Value Creation: Needs as a Strategic Focus for Organizations

Organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of sustainability and responsibility. They are challenged to develop a holistic approach to value creation that reconciles economic, social, and environmental goals. This book describes how knowledge can facilitate this process and amplifies the idea of knowledge management to strategically serve multiple stakeholders in a sustainable and responsible way. In particular, the book introduces the concept of the ＂Need Knowledge-Driven Organization.＂ It builds on mature research on organizational purpose, stakeholder theory, and phronesis, and advances the concept of ＂needs.＂ This provides a new lens for understanding the sustainable and responsible business case: First, people are motivated by their needs, and organizations represent social structures that facilitate the satisfaction of shared needs. Second, needs reflect and combine social, environmental, and economic concerns, making sustainability and responsibility more realizable for practitioners. And third, needs provide a reference point for holistic value creation and can thus align knowledge processes and structures in organizations.

Florian Kragulj is a senior scientist with the Knowledge Management Group at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), Austria. His research and teaching focus on organizational learning and managing knowledge, emphasizing its social nature and strategic future potential. He is particularly interested in an ethical perspective on knowledge management to illuminate its implications for doing well by doing good. He holds a PhD in economic and social sciences and a master’s degree in cognitive science. In 2021, he received his Habilitation (venia docendi) for business administration.