An ICT-supported intergenerational knowledge transfer framework for family firms / Sabiroh Md Sabri

In recent years, the world’s aging phenomenon has led to the increase
number of retirements in organisations. When people leave their
organisations, they also take with them their experience, skills and
knowledge, hence leaving the organisation to suffer loss of intellectual
knowledge, and certainly caused the business’s sustainability and
continuity to be in danger. This phenomenon has inevitably affected
family firms because their survival depends on tacit knowledge possessed
by the founder as the source of its competitive advantage. Therefore, to
ensure its sustainability, family firms must guarantee that their knowledge
is preserved and being transferred to the successor of the business. Many
researchers proposed knowledge transfer models which mostly focused
on knowledge transfer methods, strategies, and processes to mitigate
knowledge transfer barriers, create an optimal knowledge transfer domain
for large organisations and inter-organisational knowledge transfer.
However, the methods and strategies proposed were found to be ineffective
for family firms, thus caused the success of knowledge transfer in family
firm to be very low. This research is motivated to provide a platform for
family firm to transfer their knowledge from the older generation to the
younger generation with the consideration of family firm uniqueness. The
qualitative approach was adopted in understanding the characteristics of
family business, strategies, and mechanisms used in transferring their
knowledge.