An Empirical Analysis of the Strategic, Organizational, Financial and Technological Issues in the Implementation of Knowledge Management in Indian Automotive SMEs

Abstract

Knowledge is considered as the currency in the current knowledge economy. It is a key business asset and is considered vital to creating a sustainable competitive advantage. The growing importance of knowledge-intensive organizations makes knowledge management (KM) an essential strategic tool and a potent competitive weapon for gaining competitive advantage and improved business performance. However, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) do not realize these benefits, because of an uncertain and unclear idea of knowledge management and most of them lack innovative approaches to knowledge management. Hence, the SMEs still lag in the implementation of KM. SMEs are required to be fully aware and be perceptive of the issues that would hinder the implementation of knowledge management in SMEs. This study investigated the influence of strategic issues, organizational issues, financial issues, and technological issues in the implementation of KM in automotive component manufacturing SMEs across three tiers, i.e., Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3, in India. The overall results of the study show that the strategic issues and financial issues are significant, whereas organizational issues and technological issues are insignificant across the three tiers of SMEs. Moreover, Tier 3 SMEs are found to have several strategic and financial issues in comparison with Tier 1.