Book excerpt: There continues to be much interest in the business and academic communities in the concept of strategic competencies or core capabilities, in other words, how organisations define and differentiate themselves. More recently, this field has fragmented into a number of related disciplines with subtle differences in focus:Knowledge management — how organisations identify, share and exploit their internal competencies, in particular the knowledge of individuals.Organisational learning — the relationship between individual and organisational knowledge and how organisations ‘unlearn’ past competencies and acquire new competencies.Strategic management — how competencies can be assessed, and how these contribute to performance.Innovation management — how such competencies are translated into new processes, products and services.This book aims to integrate strategic and knowledge management approaches to capability building with the development of competencies by bringing together the latest research and practices from international experts in the field. This third edition has been fully updated with five new chapters./a