Knowledge Resources and Firm Performance: A Packaging Industry Perspective.

Manufacturers can compete based on a variety of factors ranging from plant and equipment to intellectual property. Packaging producers may be tempted to rely on their capital or technological assets for competitive advantage, when in fact they may be better off making greater investments in their knowledge resources. Previous research has shown that knowledge resources associated with a firm influence both its performance and competitiveness. However, the extent to which these knowledge resources promote or hinder firm performance can differ by industry context and much of this research has been conducted with fast-paced industries. Understanding how specific types of knowledge resources relate to performance in a given industry can be valuable to business practitioners operating within that industry and we therefore conducted a project to examine these relationships in a key segment of the packaging industry. We utilized a survey of managers in the transport packaging segment to measure both the knowledge resources available to firms, as well as the value provided by those resources in terms of firm performance. Results suggest that firms having high levels of knowledge resources perform better than those lacking such resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]