KnowlEdgE acQuiSition: thE rolE oF organiZation’S ViSion a caSE oF tEchnologY-BaSEd Start-up in indonESia

: This study aims to uncover how Organization’s vision (OV) can affect Knowledge Acquisition (KA). Qualitative research method is implemented to investigate a case of KA in technology-based Start-Up, namely e-Fishery. This study's data is collected by performing semi-constructed interviews several prominent figures in the company. Data analysis is done by thematic analysis to identify emerging themes and the interrelation between them. Findings of this research suggest that OV indirectly affects KA through influencing the way organizations interact with the customers, which in turn affects KA performance. Furthermore, this study argues the positive influence of customer oriented OV to KA success. This study contributes to KA literature by providing elaboration on OV influence and its role in the interaction inside organization-customers settings.


introduction
Knowledge has been recognized as a significant factor in organizational growth. It has been associated with the increase of company's absorptive capabilities (Osoro et al. 2016;Larrañeta et al. 2017), establishment of competitive advantage (Laursen et al. 2016;Yli-Renko et al. 2001), improvement of new product development (Yli-Renko et al. 2001), innovative capability (Prayogo and Nirawati, 2019), the creation of radical innovation (Zhou and Li, 2012), and organizational sustainability (Xie et al. 2020). Firms may acquire knowledge internally by leveraging existing knowledge residing within their members (López-Sáez et al. 2010) or externally from entities outside organizational boundaries (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1996). Firms that invest in KA will have a wide range of knowledge that offers variability to ascertain innovative capability which is useful in obtaining market success (Migdadi et al. 2017). However, merely implementing KA will not necessarily produce a meaningful result (Cruz-González et al. 2015). At times, a company could find itself swamped in unclear and opaque information as a consequence of KA (McKelvie et al. 2018). Or worse the inbound knowledge are useless therefore resource utilized for its acquisition are wasteful (McKelvie et al. 2018). Even more problematically if it continues to the development of the unneeded product which is one of the primary reasons of new business failure (cbinsight, 2021). Nevertheless, amid its complexity, the proof of KA benefit is far too compelling to be dismissed. However, the existence of contradicting findings of KA function indicates the need for further understanding.
Many have made effort to identify precursors of KA success. Some investigate its relation to social capital such as trust and relationship (Guo et al. 2019;Ortiz et al. 2017). Another found that differing knowledge source such as customer, supplier, partner, university, and investor yield distinct result which value depends on the specific context of the company (Cruz-González et al. 2015). Similar case occurs for knowledge breadth and depth. Some argue the benefit of knowledge depth for the pursue of radical innovation (Zhou and Li, 2012) while others posit knowledge breadth as a significant factor of company's innovativeness (Migdadi et al. 2017). This study, on the other hand, tries to approach the topic of KA at a more grounded level. Particularly, this study aims to uncover the potential success factor of KA in the organization's foundational level such as OV.
Despite OV and KA popularity in the business management and social science literature, study that specifically investigate their connection is extremely scarce. It is as if both have no connection worth examining. For example, a search using both concepts as keywords in SCOPUS database yields only seven results, with only three that are relevant to the topic (e.g., Kim & Lee, 2010;Narayanan & Rajaratnam, 2019;Shahzad et al., 2013). In their conceptual paper, Shahzad et al. (2013) made a compelling remark to argue the importance of the connection between OV and KA. They argue that knowledge intensive initiative requires commitment. Not only in its execution but also in the management's resolve for resource allocation. Shahzad et al. (2013) posit OV as an important precursor for knowledge intensive practice. The implementation of KA is resource demanding, both tangibly and intangibly. For instance, Kong (2015) pointed out that KA requires interaction which demands time, infrastructure, and social prowess to ensure successful execution. Therefore, implementing KA presents a challenging task to perform. And even more so if it required interaction between the company and the external entities (Kong 2015).
OV is a popular topic in management literature, especially in the last two decades. OV is associated with organizational growth (Perkins, Lean, and Newbery 2017). Primarily, OV is defined as an imagery of desired future that acts as an ultimate objective to dictate organization's purpose and to focus organization's effort and resource allocation (Snyder and Graves 1994). The existence of OV galvanized the organization's members' motivation and solidify their commitment to organization's cause (Haque, Titiamayah, and Liu 2016;Chih et al. 2018). OV's ability to situate the condition of organization's members is tied together with aforementioned argumentation by Shahzad et al. (2013) which posits OV's as an important factor to motivate organization's members to ensure KA performance. With that in mind this study set an exploratory mindset to tackle the question of "how can OV affect KA?" Therefore, this study aims to contribute to the academic discourse by filling the gap in KA literature by presenting insights regarding the role of OV to KA. Moreover, this study aims to create impact in managerial department by providing useful information, particularly for prospective entrepreneur to both refine their KA practice and as a factor to consider during a business's early development. To achieve that, this study implements a qualitative method with inductive approach to complement its exploratory nature (Saunders et al. 2019).
This study identifies KA practice in Indonesia's technology-based start-up (namely e-Fishery) as an appropriate case to fulfill the aims of this research. e-Fishery is a technology-based Start-up focusing on the aquaculture industry. Their business vision is considerably non-self-centric. It focuses on their customers' well-being instead of the organization's prosperity. Despite that, they managed to obtain rapid growth during their seven years of operation. Additionally, they indicate KA success by producing a highly consumed product inspired by direct interaction with their customers. e-Fishery's market condition is also unique as it portrays a large technology literacy gap between e-Fishery (a high-tech technology producer) and the customer (mostly consist of population in a less developed rural area). These combinations of characteristics deemed e-Fishery as a prominent entity to be investigated, particularly for this study's purpose.
The remainder of this paper consists of the methodology adopted to investigate the case of e-Fishery is presented. Furthermore, the findings of this study are announced and discussed. Lastly, limitations and potential future inquiries will be presented as a conclusion.

mEthodS
The aims of this study are to tackle the question of "how OV can affect KA?" Therefore, this study set off with exploratory motivation. For this purpose, this study implements qualitative research method. Following the guidelines provided by Yin (2009) this research employs a single case study research design to accommodate its exploratory nature. Furthermore, the method is considered appropriate due to the contemporary characteristics of the phenomena and the researchers positioning as uninvolved investigator. Moreover, the reasoning behind the decision to use singular case is due to the uniqueness in the characteristics of e-Fishery's case, which made it considerably rare to occur elsewhere. As one of the emerging prominent digital Start-up in aquaculture, e-Fishery managed to achieve rapid growth in a considerably short period of 6 years. They started their business in 2013 by offering IoT augmented automatic fish feeder to their prospective customers. Despite the lack of technological development in aquaculture prior to e-Fishery's inception among their intended customers which caused them hardship during initial penetration e-Fishery they still managed to expand their reach to more than 20 provinces in Indonesia.
Furthermore, e-Fishery demonstrates their business prowess by producing a thriving variety of products aside from fish feeders ranging from fish product e-commerce and fish feed commerce to fish farmers financial consulting. Those products are well received and widely consumed by their customers, generating up to 60% of their current income, indicating a product's effectiveness, which signals high innovation performance. Moreover, testimonies from e-Fishery's CEO suggested that some of their various products were inspired by their customer feedback, which was obtained through direct interaction. Furthermore, he indicated that the reason behind their insistence on direct interaction with their customers is due to the OV. These unique qualities placed e-Fishery as a potent specimen to be extensively studied to understand the connection between OV and KA further.
This study uses both primary and secondary data. Primary data for this study is collected by performing in-depth interviews with key members of e-Fishery (presented in Table 1). Primary data gathering is done from November 2019 to February 2020. The interview occurs in e-Fishery's main office in Bandung and done in a semi-structured manner. The purpose of the interview is to uncover the way e-Fishery operates. The interview content covers various aspects, such as companies' objectives, business development, product development, and e-Fishery's relationship with the customers. The duration of the interview varies from 37 minutes to 102 minutes.
The secondary data used in this study is taken from the previous research done by Maulana (2018) as his undergraduate thesis. The purpose of the utilization of this data is to compliment the primary data. His research highlight e-Fishery's Knowledge Transfer during Technology Adoption Process. Interview data taken from his research consisted of interviews with 6 farmers and e-Fishery's Field Officer. The content of those data contains information regarding the interaction between e-Fishery and their customers, which is appropriate to be incorporated for the purpose of this study. However, farmers' interview data from that research

rESultS
This study aims to uncover the way OV can affect KA.
Thematic analysis is done to analyze the data which summarized in Table 2. From the analysis, we found that there are three primary themes which are organization's foundation, interaction, and KA performance. Organization's foundation represented organization's core value which shape the organization purpose and behavior. It affects the way organization interact with the customers, which in turn, affect KA performance. The interplay between these three aspects is shown in Figure 1. In the case of e-Fishery, interaction with customer is done primarily in an informal mechanism.
The way e-Fishery does its interaction later affect the performance of KA.

Organizational Foundation
e-fishery's vision was mentioned verbally in the interview. However, they also present their vision in their website. Presented in the following are e-Fishery's vision, which was taken directly from their website (verbatim translation): To contribute to the fulfillment of world sustenance through aquaculture; To become a solution to a fundamental aquaculture issue by providing affordable technology; To reduce socio and economic disparities through inclusive digital economy. From what is presented above, it can be argued that e-fishery's OV is non-self-centric. This is also corresponding to the vision described by DS (Business Development Strategist) who mentioned are considerably short in duration (around 6 minutes to 32 minutes). This is due to the utilization of structured interview method which made it more direct and to the point. Regardless, the content of the farmers responses remains adequate for the purpose of this study. Another secondary data is collected from the website content as reference to e-Fishery's organization's vision. This data is taken as comparative point to measure whether e-Fishery operates according to its vision.
This study implements the 'no theory' approach by Eisenhardt (1989). This approach provides exploratory room for data interpretation by minimizing theoretical restriction, which allows novel ideas to emerge. Further, the interview result is transcribed and analyzed to identify emerging patterns. Data analysis is done with thematic analysis method. Subsequently, the data is analyzed using thematic analysis. This method is used to uncover emerging theme related to the purpose of this study. The emerging theme is later put together to find explanatory analysis suitable to explain the phenomena in the data (Saunders, Lewis, and Thornhill 2019). Lastly, previous literature is collected and reviewed to provide theoretical groundings sustaining the result of this research. However, to clarify, a certain disclaimer is necessary to be addressed: The subject investigated in this study is the interaction between e-Fishery and its customers. What is referred to as 'interaction' in this study are only ones that are officially sanctioned by e-Fishery (e.g., door-to-door marketing, routine checkup, after-sales service).  Helping farmers not only profiting the company "from the beginning we develop our technology to solve farmers' problem. Our business is aimed to not only produce financial benefit but also useful to the farmers" -e-Fishery's CEO

Farmer First
"We have a culture called 'farmers first'. We lead people here to always identify farmers' needs" -e-Fishery's Head of Business Development Business Strategy Offline First "Our customers are not familiar with automated technology, while we are exposed to it all the time. Therefore, we implement 'offline first' approach to familiarize our customers to our product" -e-Fishery's Head of Engineering Community activation "our user's knowledge of the product is vary, some of them don't have a complete understanding of our product…. that is why we develop our business model from technology based to community activation. We want to increase their skill" -e-Fishery's Head of Business Development interaction Interaction Mechanism Informal interaction "we don't have SOP to teach the farmers … we scan their condition and teach them accordingly" -e-Fishery's Field Officer Formal interaction "we have information people can access in our website … we also occasionally participate in an exhibition to introduce our product"e-Fishery's Product Manager interaction frequency Routine Visitation "every team must do routine site visitation. Marketing team in particular, must visit the site often. HR and Finance team must visit the site at least once every two or three month" -e-Fishery's CEO Communication with FO "we often meet, we often communicate, "Mr Taja what should we do? or "Mr Taja why can't I setting the feeder properly?" -Fish Farmers 4 Interaction Tools

ICT
"we use WhatsApp most of the time" -e-Fishery's Field Officer Face-to-face communication "site visitation is must. I often visit the site and converse with the farmers" -e-Fishery's CEO Interaction Topic Farming Insights "they help us in cultivation knowledge" -Fish Farmers 3 Small Talk "sometimes we were sent to the site just to catch up with farmers … it's to maintain relationship … sometimes talking about farming is boring." -e-Fishery's Field Officer Knowledge acquisition performance

Inbound Feedback
Sector context feedback "once, there is farmer who deliberately didn't use our product because he fears early harvest. We honestly thought the quicker the better. As it turns out fish farmers should sync their harvesting schedule to the pattern of the existing market practice so that their fish can be sold timely with the right price" -e-Fishery's Head of Business Development Product feedback "The cable is prone to be bitten by rats, we suggest that the cable is rat resistance" -Fish Farmers 1 Customer's behavior feedback "it turns out that farmers perception on their fish feed needs is changeable. For example, they ask for 25 tons fish feed and change it to 20 tons after some time. And they are unwilling to pay for the remainder 5 tons. Perhaps they lack understanding of the business term, especially in partnership." -e-Fishery's Head of Business Development financing "our financing service was not in our masterplan at all. We got the idea from a complaint of one of the farmers. He mentioned that our feeder increases his productivity, but he does not get wealthier. Therefore, we asked him to investigate his expenditure ... as it turns out, he was unnecessarily spending his money on the interest in fish feed fee. That inspire us to create financing service to help them obtain credit scoring so that they can have financial support from local bank, instead of peer-to-peer lending." -e-Fishery's CEO e-Fishery Fresh "we made e-Fishery Fresh to mitigate the problem in the market. We can't sale our feeder if there is no guarantee that the farmers will use it." -e-Fishery's Head of Business Development Understanding the context of farmer's problem understand supply chain problem "farmers sell their fish through a middleman. This middleman only willing to buy fish on a specific date. This is what hinders farmers from increasing their productivity." -e-Fishery's Head of Business Development understand cultivation context "cultivating catfish and shrimps are different. Our feeder is used more to cultivate shrimp because shrimps require equal growth. Therefore, it is more urgent. Catfish on the other hand, can be harvested partially. They can be harvested in several grades of sizes." -e-Fishery's Head of Business Development  about the intention to positively impact the social economy and becoming the solution for farmers problem. The consistency prevails in the "farmers first" organization's culture. It was described that the culture shapes the behavior of the members to prioritize farmers' need in every decision making. It was indicated that the implementation of that culture orients e-Fishery's business to prioritize farmers well-being instead of profit making. The effect of this culture is also shown by the determination of the company to keep going back and forth to the farmer's site. Subsequently, e-fishery implement "offline first" as strategy for initial penetration. The execution of this strategy can be interpreted in two folds, first, it might with the technician. Another interesting finding is the variety of topic that could occur in the interaction between e-Fishery and the farmers. The Field Officer testify that sometimes they were sent to the site just to have a chat with the farmers. He mentioned that the objective to that is to "maintain relationship" and to "up-sales". e-Fishery also tries to provide education regarding fish cultivation which was highly regarded by one of the farmer's remark who consider that as a form of "support" for the farmers.

Knowledge Acquisition Performance
KA is a learning process. In this analysis we indicate KA performance by investigating the amount and type of inbound information from customers and how they leverage those feedback. Feedback obtained from customers is varied. It describes customer's behavior, the contextual problem of aquaculture sector, and things to improve from the existing product. The data suggest that the procurement of these feedback is enabled by the interaction they did, particularly the use of informal mechanism. For once, they obtain the information regarding the contextual problem in the aquaculture sector through direct face-to-face interaction with the farmers. That information is shown to be useful for product development since it inspires e-fishery to create "e-fishery fresh" and "feedfund". Moreover, it was easier for the farmers to deliver their complaint or suggestion regarding the current product performance since they are frequently visit the site. The establishment of online communication channel also enables e-fishery to perform quick responds should the farmers experience difficulties.
This study aims to uncover how OV can affect KA.
The result of the analysis shows indirect relationship of OV to KA. OV affect organization's ways of interaction through its influence on business orientation and strategy. The OV adopted by e-fishery is nonself-centric, this is similar to the categorization of market-oriented entrepreneurial approach (Migdadi et al. 2017). Market oriented is documented to have a positive relationship to organizational performance, particularly in terms of delivering innovation to the market (Migdadi et al. 2017). The current study adds to the entrepreneurial literature by providing possible explanation of why market-oriented entrepreneurial approach strive in the market. Findings on current research also suggest that OV affect the member's commitment to the organizational cause. Thus, it be one of the manifestations of the "farmers first" culture or second, it may also be a sensible approach to mitigate large technology gap between e-fishery and its intended customer. However, e-fishery also implement "community activation" strategy, which pivot on a community building to improve customers familiarity to the product and also their prowess in fish cultivation. By doing community activation, e-Fishery aims to make impact to the farmers life, not only by providing a technological know-how to familiarize the farmers to their product, but also to improve their overall fish farming practice for the better.
Furthermore, they also change their business model from direct selling to subscription. Subscription model enables e-Fishery to optimize the capitalization of their product. For example, by doing subscription they seize the right to perform routine maintenance. This is done to improve the feeder utilization and to maintain good customer experience. However, from farmers perspective subscription approach is more economic as it enables them to access e-Fishery's technology cheaply. It is arguable that e-Fishery's business strategy is a mix between farmers prioritization and income generation.

Interaction
A line can be drawn from organization's foundation to the way e-fishery's done their interaction. It was mentioned by the CEO and the Head of Engineer that obtaining feedback from the farmers is paramount. In respond to that, e-fishery's mandate all their members to do routine site visitation. Especially the marketing and field team (site technician and field officer). Frontliners are demanded to do compulsory monthly visit. The objective is to maintain relationship with the farmers and to scan current emerging problems. Routine visitation also being used as tools to convey software and product updates. Interaction mechanism that is primarily used by e-fishery is informal interaction. They leverage faceto-face two-way communication. Performing direct two-way interaction helps them to obtain an in-depth insight regarding farmers daily struggles. The only formal interaction they did to the customer is on the exhibition or one-way communication from website.
Maintaining communication is necessary for e-Fishery. Therefore, e-Fishery provide a communication channel through social media such as WhatsApp. One of the farmers testify that they maintain communication

managerial implications
This study produces several managerial implications. It was demonstrated above that OV indirectly affect KA performance through shaping the way a company interact with their intended customer. Particularly, this study highlights that the content of the OV affect the company's business orientation and its strategy. This is a useful insight for managerial, especially ones that are in the middle of business initiation. Crafting OV may later affect business practice significantly. Content of organizational vision determines the focus of business practice, which may vary from market share, product, or customer focus. These types of content may affect an organization's ability to interact with their customers. Therefore, a prospective entrepreneur should carefully consider the content of their organizational vision prior to business initiation, mainly if they aim to leverage customers' insight as inspiration for innovation. Moreover, the importance of organizational vision's clarity to the organization's members is pertinent to be emphasized. That way organization's members may embody the spirit of the organization and behave in a vision-coherent manner. The findings of the current study suggest that a non-self-centric customer oriented OV may indirectly shape the company's interaction so that they can obtain comprehensive understanding on their market condition. Moreover, OV affect members commitment to the organizational cause.
Correct implementation of OV may help manager to develop a less selfish behavior by allowing the member to transcend their personal interest. Findings of the current study suggest that customers might become a useful source of insight to inspire new business opportunities regardless of their expertise or technological prowess. Management should carefully consider how organizations translate customer feedback so that organizations may avoid fuzzy and misleading information. This study suggests that management might improve that ability by implementing an appropriate organizational vision to create productive interaction. The organization might focus solely on improving customer's trust by engaging in a more informal interaction with carefully selected interaction topics.
supports findings from Haque et al. (2016) who suggest that the content of vision affect employee's commitment. e-fishery's commitment is demonstrated by the willingness to prioritize farmer's needs. Their resolve to establish interaction to the farmers also driven by their sense of duty to become the solution of farmers problems which resonates to the argumentation by Shahzad et al. (2013) who contend OV as necessary driving force for knowledge intensive initiative.
As a consequence of their vision, e-fishery's interaction becomes frequent. Frequent interaction is associated with KA success particularly because it aids the establishment of relationship and trust (Kong 2015; Lee et al. 2020). Furthermore, findings of the current study suggest the impact of informal interaction to the knowledge sharing. This resonates with findings from Weijs-Perrée et al. (2020) who found an informal and unstructured interaction as potent to invoke knowledge sharing behavior. More importantly, findings of the current research also add to the literature by suggesting the importance of interaction topic for the success of KA. Careful use of interaction topic may improve the chance to establish solid relationship to the customer which may lead to knowledge sharing intent. Furthermore, face-to-face interaction stimulates an indepth conversation which leads to a crucial knowledge sharing. Particularly, the findings of the current study suggest that contextual knowledge regarding aquaculture sector is mostly delivered during face-toface interaction.
KA is a learning process. One of the ways to decide whether learning occurs is by checking whether there is a behavioral change (Lipshitz, Popper, and Friedman 2002). Lipshitz et al. (2002) argues that productive learning occurs when the entity managed to identify and correct mistakes. In the case of e-fishery that pattern of behavior occurs. One of which is when they change their mindset after realizing that their simplistic thinking of "the quicker the harvest the better" does not resonates with the actual market situation. Their behavioral change indicate learning process. Similar incidence occurs when they were inspired to develop financing service after they were encounter farmers complaint. Even so, associating OV to the success of their learning process cannot be concluded hastily. However, at least it can be argued that OV enables e-fishery to conduct interaction that provide stream of rich inbound feedback.