On the waves of change: the burden of knowledge and strategic human capital

Recent trends indicate reduced entrepreneurship over time and greater challenges in the discovery and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities. The concept of the “Burden of Knowledge,” or the idea that as the historical body of knowledge grows in a given domain, it becomes harder to innovate due to the cost and effort necessary to master prior knowledge before being able to do so, is gaining popularity as a potential explanation. Work on the Burden of Knowledge has primarily been the domain of economics, and where it has entered the field of strategic management it has focused primarily on firm-level outcomes. In this paper, we explore the implications of the Burden of Knowledge for the strategic human capital literature, and build new theory regarding human capital specificity and entrepreneurial human capital in light of a growing Burden of Knowledge. We also introduce a series of contingencies regarding when and how we expect the growing Burden of Knowledge to impact human capital in different circumstances.