Journal of Information & Knowledge Management

Researchers and practitioners have emphasised the need for advances in knowledge management (KM) research to better understand how organisations add value from their KM practices. Thus, a comprehensive framework, rooted in two main theoretical streams of KM practices, objectivist and practice-based perspective, is proposed. We believe this explains how KM practices add value, and will assist organisations to obtain a more accurate picture of their KM practices, the factors that influence KM implementation, and how KM can be measured. The framework also serves as a means to identify how well KM practices meet organisational strategies. This paper begins with a review of different KM perspectives and then reports the findings of qualitative in-depth interviews with UK car manufacturers. The results indicate that most organisations adopt different types of KM practices, with the findings revealing that top management commitment, strategy, IT, people involvement and organisational culture were the factors that most influenced KM implementation. In conclusion, the paper advocates an integrated view of KM perspectives and mechanisms for KM practice in UK car manufacturing.

The paper describes how Harvard Business School's Knowledge and Library Services (KLS) leveraged the collective knowledge of its employees in formulating, implementing, and evaluating strategy. The organisation was faced with major, disruptive changes in its environment and needed the diverse knowledge and full engagement of all employees to make a series of strategic shifts. The shifts included integrating KLS products and services with the Harvard Business School research and course development process, developing global scope in information resources and expertise, and trading its role as the guardian of books and buildings for the organiser of the School's priority information assets. In order to achieve that, KLS launched the Environmental Scan Program, relying on employees' insights aggregated through social tagging, trend analysis and internal prediction markets tracking emerging trends. KLS also created processes for the collective assessment of strategy and a faster way of turning ideas into new products and services. The paper concludes with an assessment of the approach, pointing to a difficult balance between emergent and collective dimensions of strategy process with its formal, structured facets.

Previous studies have examined the relationship between knowledge management (KM) infrastructure capabilities and organisational performance. However, most studies neglect the mediating effect of organisational learning by KM practices (OLKMP) in the relationship between KM infrastructure capabilities and organisational performance. This study uses the survey method to discuss the relationships governing KM infrastructure capabilities, OLKMP and organisational performance. Results of the analysis confirm the impact of technology, structure and culture on OLKMP. The overall results show that OLKMP is an efficient way to enhance organisational creativity. Thus, we also explore the performance implications of OLKMP to prove that it is an important factor in creating superior organisational effectiveness.

Research on innovation practices reinforces the notion that majority of innovation projects fail systematically due to being managed as raw technology projects. Open forms of innovation where internal and external ideas are leveraged across the organisation are gaining importance over the internal and centralised approach to R&D. India, during the last 15 years, has been spiralling ahead towards ultimate economic success based on its 'knowledge-based talent pool'. Innovation has become a top strategic focus for most Indian companies. Seeing the growing importance of innovation and knowledge management, a need was felt to understand how organisations manage their knowledge capital so as to promote innovation.

This paper aims to provide insights into how an organisation manages knowledge through culture, structure, technology and leadership, so as to promote acquisition and application of knowledge which leads to innovation. The study brings out the importance of tacit knowledge embedded in the firm's culture, structure and leadership as a complement to the explicit knowledge embedded in the firm's technology and documents.

Information sharing is an important factor for effectiveness within the internal supply chain. In this paper we use a methodology for mapping information flows in an internal supply chain, and case studies of two Swedish multinational organisations. Eight retrospective cases were used to map, describe and analyse the information flow that supports the physical material flow from the receipt of an order to point of delivery. Every involved person was interviewed on at least one occasion each. The interviews were conducted to map and describe the information and physical material flow. The aim was to identify factors that could improve and rationalise information flows and generate a better flow within the organisation.

The study shows the importance of an integrated information system, but also clearly indicates the importance of a collaborative culture and an awareness of the human–technology interface. The study also shows that three factors of interface distortions are most frequent in the cases: (1) changes registered in the database trigger no action among the staff, (2) new knowledge to staff is stored only orally and not in the database, and (3) interface between the paper system and the database, and between the old and the new information storage culture.

In this paper an attempt has been made to develop a progressive partitioning and counting inference approach for mining association rules in temporal databases. A temporal database like a sales database is a set of transactions where each transaction T is a set of items in which each item contains an individual exhibition period. The existing models of association rule mining have problems in handling transactions due to a lack of consideration of the exhibition period of each individual item and lack of an equitable support counting basis for each item. As a remedy to this problem we propose an innovative algorithm PPCI that combines progressive partition approach with counting inference method to discover association rules in a temporal database. The basic idea of PPCI is to first segment the database into sub-databases in such a way that items in each sub-database will have either a common starting time or a common ending time. Then for each sub-database, PPCI progressively filters 1-itemset with a cumulative filtering threshold based on vital partitioning characteristics. Algorithm PPCI is also designed to employ a filtering threshold in each partition to prune out those cumulatively infrequent 1-itemsets early and it also uses counting inference approach to minimise as much as possible the number of pattern support counts performed when extracting frequent patterns. Explicitly the execution time of PPCI in order of magnitude is smaller than those required by the schemes which are directly extended from existing methods.

In order to consider the future development of high-tech industry clusters, this paper applies an evolution perspective to look into the knowledge integration process from both local and global knowledge linkages of entrepreneurs within the industry cluster. This paper has established a model to explore the entrepreneur's knowledge spillover and diffusion process which promotes the high-technology industry cluster's technology upgrading. Analysis is based on data from questionnaires and interviews with 182 entrepreneurs in the Dongwan software high-tech industry cluster of Guangdong, China. Using the information fusion method the study analyses the distinction of high-tech industry clusters between developing countries and developed countries based on the survey, and found that the knowledge integration process has tremendous influence on industry cluster development, and the co-existence of both high levels of local and global knowledge linkages can greatly affect entrepreneur development and the possibility for the cluster to undertake transformation.