Knowledge Management and Entrepreneurship Research and Practice: Status, Challenges, and Opportunities

Knowledge Management And New Ventures In The Literature

The notion of knowledge management in entrepreneurial companies is starting to garner an academic research focus. The number of papers published per year on knowledge management and the small and medium enterprise (SME) has been increasing linearly from almost none prior to 2000; an analysis of the publications cited in Esposito et al. (2016) indicates that the number of KM papers published in a given year on the SME is roughly that of the previous year plus one (R² = 0.90). In response to this growing interest on the topic, five literature reviews have been published in just the last four years (Durst & Runar Edvardsson, 2012; Edvardsson & Durst 2013; Garbarino-Alberti & Pastorino 2014; Esposito et al. 2016; Soares et al. 2016). These reviews agree that KM research has traditionally focused on the large company domain in which KM developed as a discipline, and only recently proceeded to address the domain of the SME.

In spite of the above activity, few rigorous works exist in the literature relating KM to entrepreneurship. This could be due in part to the fact that new ventures are characterized by severely limited resources and low probability of survival, and consequently their ability and opportunity to implement KM practices before suffering the consequences of “knowledge mismanagement” are limited. In fact, one might say that the flat managerial structure and agile business processes characteristic of entrepreneurship are in direct opposition to the somewhat time consuming and structured processes traditionally associated with KM.