Knowledge Management, Antecedent of Organizational Innovation and Competitiveness.

Abstract

In the present competitive climate where the only certainty is uncertainty, knowledge is considered the main distinguishing factor of business success and is seen as the foundation of organization's competitive advantage and innovation. Hence knowledge needs to be appropriately managed. Management of knowledge becomes as an important managerial task and an integral part of strategic management. Indeed, Knowledge Management (KM) focuses on managing different knowledge processes such as acquiring, creating, sharing, storing and applying knowledge with objective of innovation in organizations. So KM is an ideal vehicle to enable innovation. Innovation deals with the creation of new products and new processes. Organizations that continually innovate are perceived to have competitive advantage over those that fail to exploit opportunities for innovation. This article seeks to clarify the role of knowledge management in innovation and competitiveness. The questions we will try to investigate in this paper are: what is the connection between knowledge management and innovation development and how these relationships affect competitive advantage in the organization. Thus this study first demonstrates the importance of knowledge in innovation and competitiveness. Then it attempts to provide useful insights on the linkages between KM, competitiveness and innovation. For these means it represents the factors that facilitate favor effective implementation of KM in organizations, and examines the link between such factors and the generation of ideas for innovation and acquiring of competitive advantage. It also presents and discusses a model, which investigates the relationships between KM, competitiveness, and innovation. Finally this paper concludes that not only knowledge development and innovation are closely linked, in order to promote competitive advantages at the company level, but also it details a firm with a KM capability will use resources more efficiently and so will be more innovative and perform better in the competitive situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]