Deploying Knowledge Management in R&D Workspaces

Knowledge Assets In R&D-Oriented Organizations

R&D plays a fundamental role in the competitiveness of technological innovation. These R&D processes can primarily be seen as information transformation processes, transforming information about client orders, market demand and technological advancement into product and process designs (Drongelen et al., 1996). In the case of R&D organizations, knowledge workers synthesize tangible and intangible resources to create value-added knowledge-based products as their major outputs. These knowledge assets are indexed in terms of consultancy, innovative products, expert reports, and intellectual properties. The majority of professional knowledge and expertise frequently originates in the context and activity of research projects and industrial services implementations. In a project-based engineering firm, there are three main aspects of knowledge: technical, entrepreneurial and project management knowledge (van Donk & Riezebos, 2005). From another point of view, types of project knowledge can be viewed as: knowledge about projects, in projects and from projects (Damm & Schindler, 2002). Knowledge for R&D work exists in various forms and sources as indicated in Table 1. The ability to manipulate R&D knowledge highly depends on the type of knowledge source and form. For instance, internal-explicit knowledge is easy to collect and manage, while external-tacit knowledge requires a lot of efforts to acquire and maintain. Accordingly, when an organization wishes to incorporate KM, the first step is to implement knowledge audit to identify the sources of R&D knowledge and decide the management priority.