The impact of knowledge management on the performance of new product development.
详细信息
文摘
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 managers, and creating knowledge teams. Obviously, KM penetrates every business process within organization. As a core process, new product development (NPD) always makes great contribution to organizational performance. This study proposes a framework of KM and the link between KM and NPD performance aiming at identifying the key facilitators of NPD and enabling companies to launch their products into market more successful than their competitors.;Establishing on both industrial structure-based view and resource-based view on competitive advantage, knowledge-based view on competitive advantage is suggested for the theoretical basis of knowledge value chain. By analyzing knowledge value chain model, we can see clearly that the competitive advantage comes from core competence of organization—knowledge and KM.;The value of KM is difficult to pinpoint and has led senior management to manage it without actually measuring it. An essential aspect of KM is the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge and an attempt is made to measure KM in terms of knowledge acquisition and dissemination. Employing confirmatory factor and path analyses, this thesis examines the relationship between KM and the performance of NPD, and finds that some interactions between KM and moderators also have a significant effect on the performance of NPD. These findings imply that if organizations fail to understand the subtle ways by which different features of KM influence product development, they may fail to harvest the full value of KM.;After discussion of the relationship between KM and NPD, the study defines electronic new product development (E-NPD) as the convergence of customer relationship, business processes, enterprise IT applications, and knowledge management system necessary to perform continuous innovation and develop new quality products in efficient way. A circular E-NPD value chain is depicted to explore the mechanism how E-NPD takes advantage of KM. E-NPD value chain describes new ways of envisioning the NPD process, which states that NPD cannot be effectively managed without a deep understanding of the knowledge interdependencies between core activities along the value chain, The study undertakes detailed case studies of three industries, in which three patterns of E-NPD are examined.