This mobility of technical IT skills shows that such skills are usually explicit and codifiable by means of equations, procedures, blueprints, etc. Since codifiable knowledge "can be communicated from its possessor to another person in symbolic form, the recipient becomes as much in the know as the originator (Winter, 1987, p. 171). These codifiable skills are easy to transmit and receive (Teece, 1988). Thus, technical skills can easily diffuse among a set of competing firms.