THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN ACHIEVING SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN BUSINESS
Companies are struggling to gain sustainable competitive advantage in order to survive among aggressive huge competitors. To achieve that, companies must know how to create, share and use the knowledge through the company and aligning it to the company strategy and process as well. Besides, managers have to realize which knowledge strategy should be chose to improve the company's activities to gain sustainable competitive advantage. This is a case study that attempt to demonstrate how companies use organizational knowledge and knowledge management to gain sustaining competitive advantage. Knowledge Management Networking Value chain theory has been applyied to explain how the value of a knowledge network increases as the number of the members increases in Toyota. Explaining strategies that Toyota adopted to create and transfer knowledge to subsidiaries abroad in order to give a chance to local markets to create knowledge in foreign markets. In the end of this study, it can be determine how knowledge management concept is a necessary tool to gain competitive advantage for the companies especially automotive industry. KeywordsKnowledge Management, Competitive Advantage, Organizational Knowledge, Knowledge Creation, Knowledge Sharing.