This paper focuses on the strategic importance of managing and leveraging generic knowledge assets, in the form of benchmarking, for human resource management. Often knowledge assets are never located when the need arises to use them. This results in organizations incurring huge costs and efforts in “re-inventing the wheel” or grappling with the challenge of locating, selecting and applying the knowledge assets to create or sustain the competitiveness of organizations. A review of the literature is conducted in order to present an appraisal of available benchmarks for knowledge management in key international economies. It is argued that acquiring and implementing best practices is a cost effective means of adopting and using existing knowledge. The recipient of the existing knowledge must be able to select and apply best practices that add value to the organization. Best practice knowledge assets are mostly explicit in nature, and become tacit knowledge when such knowledge is applied in specific contexts. 
