مدیریت دانش – از آغاز تا پیوند نوآوری Knowledge Management – from its Inception to the Innovation Linkage

1. Introduction The phrase “knowledge management” was firstly used in the last decade of previous century. This two-word expression can be understood in several connotations. There exist many similar but also contrastive definitions. For instance, Davenport already in 1994 postulate knowledge management as “the process of capturing, developing, sharing, and effectively using organizational knowledge” (Davenport, 1994). Later Duhon (1998) provided another definition: “Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.” However, to understand the inside of knowledge management as a scientific discipline we must to review the work of the authors in the last period. Serenko & Dumay (2015a) categorized knowledge management discipline “as at the pre-science stage with progression towards normal science”. Moreover, they produced a list of scientific documents on the topic of knowledge management. They called the list as citation classics since they used citations count and consequently a cut-off citation cut as the inclusive criteria. In their opinion, citation classics compose “the core of the knowledge management body of knowledge” (Serenko & Dumay, 2015b). According to Heisig (2015), there is absolutely no doubt that the knowledge management has multidisciplinary character. As a research field, it includes many topics and disciplines. Holsapple & Wu (2008) listed and described some of them: strategy, management information systems, human resource management, organisational behaviour and others. In this paper, we focus on the relation between knowledge management and innovation. The impact of innovation on knowledge management and vice versa has come with several connotations. Today’s environment for organizations is intensively competitive and therefore innovation has become indispensable counterpart of knowledge management (Jiao et al., 2014; Babnik, Trunk Širca & Dermol, 2014; Natek & Lesjak, 2011; Arzenšek, Košmrlj & Trunk Širca, 2014). In the past, some prominent authors (e.g. Nonaka, 1994; Kogut & Zander, 1996; Grant, 1996) already emphasized knowledge transfer as a source for innovation. They were followed by du Plessis (2007) who clarify the role of knowledge management in innovation as an aid to addressing its complexity. She defined major roles that knowledge management plays in innovation. The role of sharing a tacit knowledge as a resource for innovation is among the most important (Babnik & Trunk Širca, 2014; Natek & Lesjak, 2013). Crook, et al. (2008) explained the procedure of knowledge management process and innovation topics. On the other hand, Durmus-Ozdemir & Abdukhoshimov (2017) explored the mediating role of innovation on the knowledge management process and performance.