Knowledge Management Key to Competitive Advantage
Knowledge is like light. Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere. Yet billions of people still live in the darkness of poverty (World Bank 1999).
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Abstract Knowledge is like light. Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere. Yet billions of people still live in the darkness of poverty (World Bank 1999).
The above quote sheds light on the significance of knowledge and the need to manage this vast knowledge for optimum utilization. In the last decade, knowledge management has emerged as a very successful organization practice and has been extensively treated in a large body of academic work. In today’s knowledgebased society and business, “knowledge” is seen as the main source of competitive advantage. It is often a fuzzy concept, with no direct referent in the real world. In order to conceptualize this, people use the synonym knowledge asset and view it as a strategy for attaining competitive advantage, that can be managed, evaluated, invested in, and that becomes one of the main sources of value creation within an organization. Such is the importance accorded to knowledge management in the today’s scenario that it has become a popular discipline even though the field is only 10 years old. From research perspective, knowledge management is a vast area that covers all aspects of knowledge creation, storage, sharing, development, and uses and maintenance. This chapter attempts to discuss about knowledge management as a theory which has evolved as a wholesome practice, various methods used in business for knowledge sharing and the various issues associated to knowledge management’s widening significance. Keywords Knowledge • Knowledge management • Competitive advantage • Knowledge asset
V. Maria Tresita Paul (*) · G. Prithiviraj Tirupur and Shri Krishna Institute of Management Science, PARK’S College, Coimbatore, India e-mail: [email protected] G. Prithiviraj e-mail: [email protected]
S. Sathiyamoorthy et al. (eds.), Emerging Trends in Science, Engineering and Technology, Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering, DOI: 10.1007/978-81-322-1007-8_74, © Springer India 2012
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V. Maria Tresita Paul and G. Prithiviraj
1 Introduction Knowledge management—a set of management activities, aimed at designing and influencing processes of knowledge creation and integration including processes of sharing knowledge—has emerged as one of the most influential new organizational practices. Numerous companies have experimented with KM initiatives in order to improve their performance. The society is now facing a shift from an information era to one of knowledge era. We are now living in a knowledge-based society, where individual and organizational knowledge, as well as brainpower, have replaced physical assets as critical resources in the corporate world [1]. The shift made both managers and management scholars reconsider the sources of competitive advantage. Therefore, knowledge and the ability to create and manage it, represents the main source of sustainable competitive advantage within the business environment. Knowledge management thus seems to be one of those areas, where managerial prac
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