Shalini Talwar, Rabia Nawaz, Juthamon Sithipolvanichgul, Bhumika Gupta, Amandeep Dhir. Strategic and serendipitous knowledge arbitrage: what we know and what remains underexplored?. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, In press, pp.1-13. ⟨10.1109/TEM.2023.3293170⟩.

Knowledge management has become a major focal point of many scholarly discussions and industry decisions in the recent past. Knowledge arbitrage, concerned with enabling the flow of knowledge from surplus pools of knowledge to deficit ones, is a part of knowledge management and sharing. Strategic knowledge arbitrage and strategic knowledge serendipity (SKARSE) have been conceptualized as a strategic version of knowledge arbitrage, embodying the idea of a better, faster, and more efficient handling of knowledge assets. Despite being a part of academic research and discussions for the past two decades, which has resulted in an evident deepening of the knowledge era, the research on SKARSE has not yet reached a significant level of maturity, mandating additional and more contemporary investigations. Responding to this need, this article sought to motivate research in the area by applying the systematic literature review (SLR) approach to create an organized body of knowledge and set the future research agenda. We executed the SLR using a well-defined search protocol to identify 22 congruent studies, employing thematic analysis to aggregate and evaluate congruent evidence. As a result, we first delineated three main themes—conceptualizations of SKARSE, antecedents of SKARSE, and consequences of SKARSE—carried out a critical appraisal of the findings to identify research gaps and suggest potential research questions, and formulated a conceptual framework embodying varied aspects of SKARSE. This article offers significant implications for theory and practice.