The studies in the first category measure the impact of KM
strategies on organizational performance by using financial indices
like returnon sales (ROS), returnon assets (ROA), and returnon equity
(ROE). Pai [18] empirically investigated 20 Taiwanese integrated
circuit (IC) design firms from 1997 to2002, and categorized them into
discoverers, discretionists, external learners, internal exploiters, and
overall creationists – emphasizing both learning from external
sources and exploitation from internal sources. It was found that the
internal exploiters were the best performers, while the discoverers
were the worst in terms of ROA and ROE.