TopIntroduction
There is one challenge that all businesses face in the unpredictable world of knowledge-based competition. That challenge is to balance organizational innovativeness and flexibility with disciplines that turn innovative pursuits into tangible business advantage. However, the mere act of adapting knowledge itself does not guarantee strategic benefit (Zack, 2002); instead, knowledge has to be managed. In next years, firms that create new knowledge and apply it effectively and efficiently will be successful at creating competitive benefits. Skyrme (2001) explains knowledge management (KM) as ‘the explicit and systematic management of important knowledge – and its related procedure of creation, organization, dispersion, use and utilization KM doctrines have been studied and executed in every organizational training and declaration (Kebede, 2010). This difference has donated to the rapid advance of the field, but also to a lack of merging of ideas and terminology (Clarke & Turner, 2004). In this situation, there are several challenges to determining; KM as a separate systems (Kebede, 2010). From a viewpoint, firms are observing the importance of managing knowledge if they want to remain competitive (Zack, 1999) and grow (Salojrvi, Furu, & Sveiby, 2005). Now that technologies executed to increase knowledge sharing have grown up, researchers and professional are able to express on the factors of their success (Hall & Goody, 2007). In spite of all advances in these viewpoints, the result has been an inconceivable and confusing body of knowledge and many managers do not know which variables can improve KM schedules success (Moffett, McAdam, & Parkinson, 2002). There is not an explicit model about the variables which KM have a significant influence on. Influences of KM schedules on innovation and integrated in performance have been analyzed in works (Choi, Poon, & Davis, 2008). Few studies test the link between knowledge and performance (Tseng, 2008), thus existent a research gap on how and under which circumstances KM enterprises lead to better results. Besides, organizational knowledge plays an important role in innovation procedure. However, it is difficult to show final decision from the literature about the relationship between effective KM, innovation and performance since research examining this link is developing (Darroch, 2005). Thus, the aim of these research is to contribute to the advance of KM research from a strategic point of view and spread knowledge involving a certain subject whether KM can be translated into better organizational performance, directly or indirectly through an increase on firm’s innovation. We suggest and test a model that links two KM strategies (codification and personalization) and their results on innovation and on financial and non-financial performance. Our final decision, based on an empirical study consisted of 195 Iranian organizations and structural equations modeling which help academics and managers in designing KM strategic schedules in order to obtain higher effectiveness, efficiency and profit capacity.