Leveraging knowledge in the innovation and learning process at GKN

摘要

To succeed in the competitive business arena, companies must leverage their existing knowledge and create new knowledge that favourably positions them in their targeted market. There has been a great deal of effort to develop new applications of information technology to support the digital capture, storage, retrieval and distribution of an organisation's explicitly documented knowledge. It is also recognised that tacit knowledge plays an important role in innovation and, thus, organisations need to divert attention to social capital that develops from people interaction and which in turn requires alignment of organisational structure, culture, and reward systems. However, there is a gap between knowledge management theories and practice, in particular in terms of issues related to knowledge management objectives, strategic implementation, and alignment of organisational parameters. This paper, through the case study of GKN, explores how these issues have been handled in the real world.