Creative industries are an interesting paradox for social scientists. Creative professionals need freedom and a free flow of ideas to stimulate their own innovations. Yet as businesspeople, they must protect, one would assume, some proprietary information to maintain a competitive advantage. A chef may have a signature recipe, a magician a trademark illusion, and a fashion designer a distinguishing style that they would not reveal to their peers.
Gourmet cuisine is a peculiar industry because there is a lot of innovation but people engage extensively in knowledge sharing. Chefs are not secretive about their recipes and techniques: they tend to share them with competitors. Given that these recipes and techniques are important to them in order to gain competitive advantage, the question we were trying to answer was: Why do they share these key assets so freely without worrying about the fact that someone else will copy them or appropriate this information? If you want to be considered as a chef with capital ‘C,’ people expect that you use the information that you get in a particular way. Namely, the expectations are: you do not copy exactly; you cite the source of the information; you do not transfer the information to third parties without permission. Chefs’ assessment of how well knowledge recipients would conform to these norms was key to their decision about whether or not to share information. In other words, they asked themselves, “Can I trust this person or not?”
INFORMATION SHARING WITH COMPETITORS: WISDOM OR FOLLY?
by Giada Di Stefano
http://www.hec.edu/Knowledge/Strategy-Management/Business-Strategy/Information-Sharing-With-Competitors-Wisdom-or-Folly
Creative professionals such as chefs, fashion designers, or even computer programmers do not produce their work in a vacuum. They receive inspiration from fellow professionals. And yet, proprietary information may be the basis of their competitive advantage. A new study examines the calculus Italian gourmet chefs perform in order to decide whether to share professional secrets with other chefs.
KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER: NOT A SIMPLE EQUATION
Giada Di Stefano and her two co-authors, Andrew King and Gianmario Verona, studied gourmet restaurants in Italy to see how the chefs of these restaurants decided whether or not to share information with their colleagues, or, in the parlance of the study, whether to “transfer knowledge.” They found there were norms at work in the industry that guided the behavior of those involved, but those norms alone were not enough to predict how chefs would behave when it came to deciding whether or not to help a fellow chef. They also took into account mediating elements that determined whether or not they perceived the potential knowledge recipient as trustworthy.
CHEFS WITH A CAPITAL ‘C’: NORMS AT WORK
“Gourmet cuisine is a peculiar industry because there is a lot of innovation but people engage extensively in knowledge sharing,” Di Stefano explains. “Chefs are not secretive about their recipes and techniques: they tend to share them with competitors. Given that these recipes and techniques are important to them in order to gain competitive advantage, the question we were trying to answer was: Why do they share these key assets so freely without worrying about the fact that someone else will copy them or appropriate this information?” This is where social norms come into play. By interviewing chefs in the U.S. and Italy, the researchers found that the demimonde of gourmet cuisine is regulated by certain rules. “If you want to be considered as a chef with capital ‘C,’ people expect that you use the information that you get in a particular way,” Di Stefano says. Namely, the expectations are: you do not copy exactly; you cite the source of the information; you do not transfer the information to third parties without permission. Chefs’ assessment of how well knowledge recipients would conform to these norms was key to their decision about whether or not to share information. In other words, they asked themselves, “Can I trust this person or not?”
CONTEXTUAL CUES
Previous research on norms has suggested that people are more willing to transfer knowledge when they feel there are rules that proscribe certain uses, which the authors’ work supports. However, Di Stefano, King and Verona also found that in the case of gourmet chefs, they used specific contextual cues to judge whether a potential knowledge recipient could be expected to abide by these rules. “The basic contribution of this paper is to show that these cues are what allow people to form expectations about the behavior of others, to decide whether a person is someone they can trust,” Di Stefano says. “Based on that, they decide ultimately if they want to transfer knowledge or not.” This “strategic component” included chefs’ consideration of: the reputation of the knowledge recipient; the level of competition between the knowledge holder and the knowledge recipient; the visibility of the behavior of the knowledge recipient in the social group.
CHEFS ARE BOTH ARTISTS AND BUSINESSMEN
As might be expected, chefs were less willing to share information with restaurants in competition with their own. According to the researchers, this is because chefs are more suspicious about competitors and believe they may have an incentive to “misbehave,” i.e., violate social norms. Analogously, chefs were more willing to share knowledge with chefs with a high reputation, as they expected such “big names” to abide by extant social norms. Interestingly, this is only part of the explanation, as chefs are more willing to share knowledge with reputed counterparts regardless of the expectation that they will follow the rules. The researchers argue that this is probably because by transferring knowledge to reputed counterparts, chefs expect to gain repute in return. “Perhaps the fact that they have entered into an exchange relationship with a well-regarded industry player signals something about their own quality, or possibly chefs want some of their recipes to be diffused (as long as they can claim paternity of a dish) and transferring to a reputed chef may increase the fame and distribution of a recipe,” the paper states.
In short, there were many complex considerations that chefs took into account when deciding whether to share information. “Strong social norms are not enough to guarantee knowledge flows,” Di Stefano says. “These chefs are artists and craftsmen, but they are also businessmen and, as such, engage in highly complex reasoning before giving information away.”
(sk)
Knowledge Sharing といっても、無条件になされるわけではない。
相手が信頼できればシェアする、信頼できなければシェアしない。
シェアしろと言われても、無条件でシェアするというわけにはいかない。