Practices of managing knowledge sharing: towards a second wave of knowledge management

This paper presents case study findings on practices of knowledge sharing in 10 large companies, each with more than 1000 employees. All initiatives belong to the so‐called ‘first wave of knowledge management’, where the focus is on knowledge acquisition, exchange and creation by individual employees, supported by information and communications technologies and introduced by management. We found various biases and traps that seem to be general within the ‘first wave’ of managing knowledge. Based on this research, we discuss conditions of the ‘second wave of knowledge management’ that might overcome the various problems that we encountered.