Nowadays, Iran is the largest automaker in the Middle-East and the 12th largest in the world. Iran’s automotive industry is also the second most active industry within the country. Leading automobile manufacturing companies in Iran consist of ten companies. It seems that the application of knowledge-based theories with the purpose of promoting the core competencies of companies in this industry in Iran plays an important role in improving the quality and quantity of production; and, consequently, boosts the companies’ competitiveness against foreign competitors. Hence, examining
knowledge management in order to achieve the core competencies is important and necessary. In their famous layered model, Scott and Davis (2007) classified knowledge-based theories in ecological level. These theorists have examined how variations in an organization’s access to key resources or in its ‘‘know-how’’ might lead to differences in performance. Recent years have witnessed a groundswell of interest in organizational differences in ‘‘core competence’’ (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990), ‘‘dynamic capabilities’’ (Teece and Pisano, 1994), and ‘‘knowledge’’ (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). All of these approaches call attention to the competitive advantages that result from idiosyncratic combinations of resources, namely ‘‘financial, human, intangible, organizational, physical, and technological’’. According to Prahalad and Hamel (1994), ‘‘the theory of core competence as a subset of resource-based view of a firm, allows organizations to rethink, identify, and exploit what they can do to make growth possible in global competition’’ (Kong, 2007). Hamel (1991) describes a core competence as ‘‘a messy accumulation of learning’’, comprising tacit and explicit knowledge, skills and technologies, which gives an organization a competitive advantage (Pilbeam and Corbridge, 2006). For firms seeking competitive advantage, the challenge of creating competence-based competitiveness has gained an increasing int