Knowledge Integration: The Practice of Knowledge Management in Small and Medium Enterprises

✍ Scribed by Fons Wijnhoven (auth.), Dr. Antonie Jetter, Professor Dr. Hans-Horst Schröder, Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, Professor Dr. Fons Wijnhoven (eds.)

• Publisher: Physica-Verlag Heidelberg
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 207
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The ability to manage knowledge is relevant for millions of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that operate in high-tech environments. They strongly depend on external knowledge about customers, technologies, and competitors because, as opposed to large companies, they have limited internal knowledge resources and little power to control their business environments. Present KM literature, however, mainly focuses on large companies and therefore does not explain, how SMEs, for example, can successfully apply groupware, data mining, semantic networks, and knowledge maps. This book addresses this problem by introducing the concept of knowledge integration (KI) that places emphasis on the identification, acquisition and use of external knowledge. Drawing from this theoretical basis, the book presents concepts and instruments specifically designed for SMEs, as well as examples of their implementation and use in practice.

✦ Table of Contents

Knowledge Management: More than a Buzzword....Pages 1-16
Knowledge Integration by SMEs — Framework....Pages 17-28
Knowledge Integration by SMEs - Practice....Pages 29-45
Organizing the Toolbox - Typology and Alignment of KI Solutions....Pages 47-64
Elicitation — Extracting Knowledge from Experts....Pages 65-76
Codification — Knowledge Maps....Pages 77-90
Detection — Electronic Knowledge Retrieval....Pages 91-100
Assessment — Making Sense of It All....Pages 101-114
Transfer - Knowledge Transfer in Networks....Pages 115-125
Motivating — Incentive Systems for Knowledge Provision....Pages 127-141
Supporting Knowledge Integration at SMEs — The KINX Portal....Pages 143-159
Supporting Knowledge Integration at SMEs — Policies....Pages 161-174
Wrapping It All Up - Past, Present and Future of Knowledge Integration....Pages 175-191

✦ Subjects

Management; Technology Management; Personnel Management