The Research On The Relationship Of Knowledge Management, Organizational Learning, Innovation And Core Competencies

With the advent of the age of knowledge economy, knowledge becomes the main source of enterprise core competencies. In order to change knowledge into core competencies, enterprise must manage knowledge efficiently with continuous organizational learning. As a result, knowledge management and organizational learning become the focus of research these years. This thesis is a systematical study on the relationship between them. And how the interaction of knowledge management and organizational learning improve innovation and eventually core competencies is also discussed. This paper contains two parts, which are theoretical research and empirical analysis.In the theoretical part, firstly, the concept of knowledge management and organizational learning is defined from the angle of research literature. Then, the the relationship among knowledge management, organizational learning, innovation and performance is discussed. Further, based on the literature study, the author considers that:(1) Embedding knowledge management into the process of organizational learning leads to the integration of knowledge management and organizational learning; (2) Organizational learning could cause the growth of enterprise knowledge assets, and promote the core competencies through innovation. At the end of the part, an interactive model of knowledge management, organizational learning, innovation and core competencies is proposed. This model, which based on the tacit knowledge, is constructed with knowledge management as support system, organizational learning and innovation as intervening variables and improvement of core competencies of enterprises as target variable.In the part of empirical analysis, base on 406 samples, the following conclusions have been found by exploratory research and confirmatory study:(1) Knowledge management includes five factors that are "knowledge infrastructure", "knowledge acquisition", "knowledge transfer and sharing", "knowledge application", and "tacit knowledge creation". Organizational learning includes four facrors that are "learning commitment", "shared vision", "open mind" and "multi-level learning". The stability of the two factor models is verified. (2) After the reliability and validity analysis, the paper adopts the structural equation model as well as regression to probe the positive effect which knowledge management and organizational learning on innovation and performance. Knowledge management has the positive influence on the performance significantly, while the impacts of tacit knowledge creation on the open mind and innovative are most remarkable. However, organizational learning and innovation act as a partial mediator. (3) Finally, a structure equation model is established. The result shows that the goodness of fit of this model is very acceptable.At the end of the paper, some suggestions on the two aspects of knowledge management and organizational learning are proposed, so that the verified conclusions in this paper have not only academic but also practical significance.