| dc.description.abstract | Among the world’s top 500 companies, more than 60% of them have been successful in knowledge management by fully utilizing tangible and intangible assets and intellectual capitals. Through the integration, preservation and sharing of knowledge, those companies improve their competitiveness and creativity. Over the past few decades, Taiwan has an economic development model dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the traditional industries. The model, compared with those in Europe and America, has certain differences. Because of these differences, these SMEs in Taiwan have an urgent need for the establishment, modification, and implementation of a knowledge management framework, especially for leading to the sustainability of the enterprises.
This study found that, under senior management’s beliefs and support, introducing a knowledge management system consistent with existing ISO quality management system can produce beneficial effects. However, to make the system effective, organizational change is required, with the implementation following a cycle similar to the framework of PDCA (plan-do-check-act or plan-do-check-adjust). The case study shows that implementing the knowledge management system in the R&D department of the case company can be integrated into existing management system processes and bring about certain benefits in product innovation. The case company still faces some organizational and management factors that hinder the full effectiveness of knowledge management, e.g., the problem of employee individualism and the miscommunications or poor communication between different departments resulted from the organizational inertia in an old, traditional hierarchical organization. These issues can be further explored in future study possibly from the perspective of human resources management. It is hoped that the results of this study can serve as a reference for many small and medium-sized enterprises in the similar situation to achieve greater competitiveness and business sustainability through better knowledge management. | en_US |