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Introduction
Firms seriously addressing trust, commitment and collaboration to create and share knowledge have prompted new management direction for the construction industry worldwide that helps them become learning organisations. Construction research has highlighted the importance of trust among project participants in order to establish long-term commitment among them and to work collaboratively to benefit the construction industry. This changing face of the industry is giving an impetus to the proliferation of business philosophies such as organisational learning (OL) and knowledge management (KM) and supply chain management (SCM) which have their principles solely founded on the notion of trust, commitment and collaboration. [7] Dodgson (1993, p. 377) describes learning organisations as purposefully constructing structures and strategies to enhance and maximise the way that they learn from their experiences and the experiences of others outside their organisations. He claims that they continually transform themselves through facilitating a climate where members are encouraged to learn and share knowledge, linking learning opportunities across the supply chain as well as with clients/customers, and creating development strategies for people and the business centred upon learning. This involves more than KM or SCM.
The premise is that as SCM reinforces the concept of whole supply chains working collaboratively to obtain business benefits, KM principles adopted for the whole supply chain can unleash immense creativity and innovation providing significant competitive advantage to supply chain partners. This can be facilitated by the Knowledge Advantage (K-Adv) framework that has been devised in Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, Australia with the support of the Cooperative Research Centre for construction Innovation (CRC CI). The K-adv framework can be adopted by any organisation in a supply chain in order to hasten its innovative and creative abilities and to become highly competitive.
It is argued here that a combined knowledge strategy is required to unleash the creativity and innovation in the supply chain as organisations start to work together by embracing supply chain management and acting as one integrated entity rather than being discrete entities. Hence a Knowledge Advantage framework adopted by organisations in a supply chain needs to be coordinated among members. This study emphasises that a knowledge advantage measurement framework should be applied across various organisations to form a collaboratively working and practicing supply chain.