Enterprise Knowledge Management Capabilities

Knowledge management (KM) is of growing interest in today's business and academic community. With the importance of KM being realized, companies are viewing KM as a critical success factor in today's dynamic borderless society. In addition to the growing literature on the subject, organizations are creating managerial positions, such as Chief Knowledge Officers, and creating knowledge teams. We can say KM penetrates every business process within organization.To guide the study as a whole, this dissertation adapts a corporate KM capability framework which consists of KM process, KM infrastructure, KM application and Knowledge "Ba", after having examined the nature of KM and explored different KM frameworks.Establishing on industrial structure-based view and resource-based view on competitive advantage, this dissertation suggests a knowledge-based view on competitive advantage as new paradigms for strategic planning. A knowledge value chain model is depicted to explore the mechanism how companies take advantage of KM Capabilities. Knowledge value chain describes new ways of envisioning the strategic process, which states that business strategies cannot be effectively shaped without a deep understanding of the knowledge capability interdependencies between core activities along the value chainAs a core capability of innovation, new product development (NPD) always makes great contribution to organizational performance. This dissertation proposes a framework of the link between KM process capabilities and NPD performance aiming at identifying the keyfacilitators of NPD and enabling companies to launch their products into market more successfully than their competitors. Attempts are made to measure KM capabilities in terms of knowledge acquisition and dissemination and to use the results of empirical study for leveraging an organization against its competitors in the context of NPD.The findings and conclusion of this dissertation can not only theoretically explain and analyze corporate KM activities, but also guide the development of corporate KM capabilities in practice.