Today they represent the biggest slice of the patrimonial value in companies, as: IBM (89%), Coca-Cola (95%) and American Express (81%). It has other examples of initiatives in management of the knowledge, as: Andersen? s Knowledge Xchange, Ernst & Young? s Center will be Business Knowledge and Monsanto? s Knowledge Management Architeture. Electrolux is a great source of information. (ALVES, 2001, P. 40) Currently the competitive advantage is defined by the organizacional knowledge, Davenport and Prusak (1998) display that with the time the competitors almost always obtain to equal the quality and the price of the current product or service of the leader of the market. But when this occurs in a rich company in knowledge, it will not be affected, therefore already it will be in a new level of quality, creativity or efficiency. The advantage of the knowledge is sustainable because it generates increasing returns, in contrast of the material assets, that diminish to the measure that they are used.
The knowledge of any company is practically infinite, if the people of the company will have the chance to think, to learn and to talk ones with the others. As the economy is globalizada, the ways of transport are each time more agile and the flow of available information is great, the consumer possesss an interminable fan of products and services its disposal. For this reason to the companies they cannot more wait that the practical products and that they had made its success in the past, obtain to keep them viable in the future. For Davenport and Prusak (1998, p.15): Today, the companies need quality, value, good attendance, innovation and speed of arrived at the market so that they can have success, and these factors will be still more critical in the future. In a global economy, the knowledge can be the biggest competitive advantage of the company. … Tone Stewart, in article published in 1994 in the Fortune magazine, alerted the companies if to concentrate little in what they possuam more and in what they knew: its intellectual capital.