PRESENT AN INTEGRATED KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT MODEL FOR ENABLING R&D INNOVATION

Business organizations constantly struggle to secure core competence to obtain and sustain their competitive advantages. Such a struggle has inevitably deepened industrial segmentation, shortened product life cycle, and intensified competition. The trend is readily apparent in high technology industries such as computers, communications, and electronics. The competitive environment of these kind of high technology industries are typically associated with rapid change and substantial uncertainty and demand continuous improvement in R&D capability. As a result, high technology organizations, faced with the dynamically changing environment, recognize R&D innovation as an unavoidable challenge. The knowledge intensive nature of R&D led many scholars to emphasize knowledge management (KM) as an important means of R&D innovation. The purpose of this article is to present a knowledge management model for R&D organization and discuss how to employ it for their innovation. This paper first derives generic elements for effective KM implementation. Then, considering the elements, this paper develops on integrative KM model for enabling R&D organization, its generic characteristics should be considered essentially in designing KM activities.