Journal of Information & Knowledge Management

Through interviews with representatives from GE Healthcare, we determined that a central problem of their current knowledge management system is users' inability to effectively retrieve the documents they need in order to carry out the everyday business activities of the corporation. We propose a three-pronged approach to resolving the problem, from a user-, data-, and system-centred perspective. From the users' perspective, we conducted user-based usability studies to confirm and identify the key problem. For our data-centred approach, we developed a new Dublin Core-compatible metadata schema that has the following four key characteristics: compatibility with existing practices, specificity to the corporation's needs, simplicity to facilitate easy adoption and flexibility to evolve as the corporation grows and changes. From a system-centred perspective, we developed a new search interface for GE Healthcare that incorporates our proposed metadata schema to improve the effectiveness of the information search.

The successful writing and management of collaborative research projects requires a common understanding of the project's objectives by all partners involved. It also requires a clear vision of the project inputs and outputs. This paper presents two case-studies where concept maps were used as a knowledge management tool in order to support both project life-cycle management and project proposal writing. Concept maps were drawn in both cases in order to describe the main activities executed in the project work packages (WPs) and to show how the WPs were linked to each other.

Organisational cultural factors are key to knowledge management effectiveness. Existing research on cultural factors that facilitate knowledge management has been fragmented. This paper proposes a theoretical framework that integrates existing research on cultural factors that influence knowledge management. This framework incorporates three cultural categories: cultural factors related to the orientation to knowledge, cultural factors related to the orientation to people and cultural factors related to the orientation to work. Each category influences knowledge management in a different way, related to the effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability of knowledge management. This framework has significant implications for practice and research.

Transfer of research results in production systems requires, among others, that knowledge be explicit and understandable by stakeholders. Such transfer is demanding, as so many researchers have been studying alternative ways to classic approaches such as books and papers that favour knowledge acquisition on behalf of users. In this context, we propose the concept of Knowledge Experience Package (KEP) with a specific structure as an alternative. The KEP contains both the conceptual model(s) of the research results which make up the innovation, including all the necessary documentation ranging from papers or book chapters; and the experience collected in acquiring it in business processes, appropriately structured. The structure allows the identification of the knowledge chunk(s) that the developer, who is acquiring the knowledge, needs in order to simplify the acquisition process. The experience is needed to point out the scenarios that the user will most likely face and therefore refer to. Both structure and experience are important factors for the innovation transferability and efficacy. Furthermore, we have carried out an experiment which compared the efficacy of this instrument with the classic ones, along with the comprehensibility of the information enclosed in a KEP rather than in a set of Papers. The experiment has pointed out that knowledge packages are more effective than traditional ones for knowledge transfer.

In the era of globalisation and with the advent of knowledge economies, organisational innovation has assumed a critical role in enhancing economic performance of firms. Proponents of the Resource Based View of the firm and its more recent extensions such as the Knowledge Based View and Dynamic Capabilities Theory have suggested that generation, diffusion and application of organisational knowledge could be the source of sustained competitive advantage and superior performance of firms. While there is near unanimity in accepting the vital role of innovation in a firm's performance, consensus on what constitutes organisational innovation and how to measure it has proven to be elusive so far. Most previous research in this area has conceptualised innovation through one or more dimensions of a firm's innovative capability using R&D of a firm only. The measurement of the construct has thus reflected this narrow conceptualisation with a single measure of R&D expenditure being the most often used proxy. This study utilises a broader definition of organisational innovation capabilities that includes the generation, dissemination and strength of innovative activity in a firm. The unique features of this study is that it uses multiple indicators of a firm's innovation profile along with lagged measures of market value using fixed effects panel data analysis.

This paper investigates and evaluates the process of knowledge transfer in construction projects. Due to the highly competitive nature of business environments, knowledge transfer between organisations has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, although organisations can realise remarkable benefits by transferring knowledge from one unit to another, successful knowledge transfer can be difficult to achieve. The discussions presented in the paper are mainly based on findings of two case studies. The two cases were selected from Private Finance Initiative (PFI) projects in the UK. According to the case study findings, different stages of a knowledge transfer process can be overlapped, omitted, repeated as well as intermitted and then restarted. One of the significant findings of the case studies was the role of the "knowledge mediator". In selected case studies, there were external consultants and expert staff in the form of knowledge mediators. The importance of their roles was frequently highlighted by the interview participants. They were not only facilitating the close liaison between the knowledge source and the receiver, but also their role was strongly associated with practices of translation and interpretation. This combined role of mediator/translator, therefore, appears to be particularly significant for inter-organisational knowledge transfer in PFI projects.

A conceptual framework originating within the Operations Research literature is presented as a means of informing researchers about how they might better understand and exploit knowledge management/sharing/transfer in business-to-business knowledge networks. Preliminary analysis of a recent Indian case study supports the utility of this framework through the identification of facilitators (information systems, mediators) and barriers (distance, organisational) to successful knowledge flow between organisations both domestically and internationally. The ongoing challenge is to increase our understanding of how firms can better balance knowledge protection and sharing such that managers involved in these inter-organisational exchanges can maximise the benefits to both sides of the dyad; especially in emerging markets such as India with different market characteristics, institutional development and business customer behaviours.