Knowledge Management and Entrepreneurship Cases in India

Introduction

As commercial organizations face up to modern pressures to downsize and outsource they have lost knowledge as people leave and take with them what they know. This knowledge is increasingly being recognized as an important resource and organizations are now taking steps to manage it. In addition, as the pressures for globalization increase, collaboration and co-operation are becoming more distributed and international. Knowledge sharing in a distributed international environment is becoming an essential part of Knowledge Management (KM). In this chapter I make a distinction between hard and soft knowledge within an organization and argue that much of what is called KM deals with hard knowledge and emphasizes capture-codify-store. This is a major weakness of the current approach to KM. Therefore, new systems are required that not only locate, capture, store, share and leverage data and information, but also knowledge that too soft knowledge.

The chapter focuses on understanding KM as a tool for developing competitive edge and tries to identify areas of KM application for entrepreneurship success. Knowledge that supports the decision making process is an obvious vital resource; however, knowledge has often suffered from under management in the past. It is only in recent years that knowledge has been taken more seriously.

The structure of the chapter is as follows: the first part gives the theoretical backdrop like what is knowledge, relationship of data, information and knowledge, soft and hard knowledge, emergence of entrepreneurial economy and strategy for KM. The second part of the chapter would comprise of understanding the unique challenges faced by the entrepreneurs during the adoption of KM, the switch over, the impact on the working of enterprises. For this part the methodology adopted is as below: