Knowledge management awareness and maturity levels of small and medium enterprises (smes) in technoparks of Turkey

Date

2014

Author

Wibowo, Muhamad Prabu

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Knowledge is one of the most important capitals in this information era. Maximizing the use of knowledge for improving entrepreneurship, innovation and technological development while focusing on the long-term vision of the organization, will enhance the organization resilience to challenges and obstacles and improve its competitiveness. With that awareness and realizations of the importance of well-managed knowledge, more and more enterprises, including Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), are incorporating Knowledge Management (KM) and implementing Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) into their workflows. With KM practices, many organizations could achieve the competitive advantage and innovation so that they can compete with other organizations. The main objective of this research is to assess the awareness and the current maturity of Turkish SMEs in technoparks. This study also involves a systematic and comparative literature of the best practices and critical success factors of KM practices in creating the model of KM awareness. G-KMMM or General KM Maturity Model inspires the model of KM maturity level. The data is mainly acquired through questionnaire of 120 companies throughout the technoparks. The main result of this study is that most of the surveyed SMEs are aware of the best practices of KM. However, most of them have low maturity levels of KM meaning that they are adopting it partially and still at a shallow level. In the correlation analysis, some of Aspects in KM Awareness and Maturity Levels are affected by the size, age, annual revenue, location, sector, and industry of the company. The result of this study provides understanding on how surveyed SMEs act and behave toward KM practices and it can be used for broader scope of study of the whole Turkish SMEs or SMEs in developing countries.

Subject Keywords

Knowledge management., Small business., Business enterprises

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12617516/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/23679

Collections

Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis