THE KNOWLEDGE CREATION OF FRANCHISEE AND FRANCHISOR: A CASE STUDY OF OCHAYA IN THAILAND

Abstract

Knowledge management is very essential for organization that linked with uncertain of market and economy situation to manage their competitive advantage through current circumstances. The organizations that can move faster on knowledge and merge with new innovation to make the organization more powerful in term of creating knowledge develop new efficiency processes to support the whole organizations as the spiral of knowledge that present how knowledge work in the organizations. (Nonaka, The Knowledge Creation Company, 2007) This thematic paper attention about how knowledge management in term of knowledge creation plays in the franchise business that the purpose is to collect existing tacit and explicit knowledge and search more about necessary knowledge that would implement to fulfill the knowledge gap between franchisor and franchisees to develop the working processes between them through knowledge creation of the both sides. The case study of this thematic would like to present is new comer of pearl tea franchise that has operated for two years which high competitive market situation in Thailand, so this case will lead to answer what are critical knowledge that this franchise need to gain and transfer to franchisees. KEYWORDS: Knowledge management/ knowledge creation/ franchise business/ knowledge gap