In today’s economy, companies establish intense interactions with trading partners: co-design teams and other formal/informal structures are commonly used to implement collaborative knowledge creating processes. However, companies not only learn from R&D but from all the operational or managerial activities that are involved in trading. Business relationships are often represented just in terms of “economic transactions”, namely the material acts of exchanging goods and money. However, the act of trading involves an intense exchange of knowledge between the parties. Companies learn from all the operational or managerial activities that are involved in a business relationship; so, it is important to understand the mechanisms by which they can capitalise knowledge exchanges with trading partners. To represent these processes, the paper employs and develops the model of knowledge transaction proposed in a previous study: a knowledge transaction is defined as the act of exchanging valuable pieces of knowledge. The model is applied for representing and interpreting the mechanisms of inter-firm interactions that are involved in economic transactions between a seller (more precisely, a supplier) and a buyer (i.e. a client firm). Since any economic transaction implies a number of communications before, during, and after the material exchange, and these communications carry pieces of knowledge, consequently they involve a number of knowledge transactions. Each piece of knowledge has a value for both the “sender” and the “receiver”. Consequently, a knowledge transaction implies a “payback” that may consist in another piece of valuable knowledge.
To validate the usefulness of the model of knowledge transaction, a case-study analysis of inter-firm business relationships and economic transactions in a group of interacting firms (i.e.: the SAP network) is proposed. The case-study, that focuses on the identification and analysis of knowledge transactions occurring in trading, allows to verify the potential usefulness of the model, to highlight the current elements of weakness of this research line, and to suggest the points of a future research agenda
