Supporting the Sustainable Growth of SMEs with Content- and Collaboration-based Personal Knowledge Management Systems

Abstract

Personal knowledge management (PKM) has been envisaged as a decentralising revolution and as the most important educational concern. Its root objective aims for highly knowledgeable individuals acting competently in their daily lives, as part of the workforce, and as public citizens. However, such a promising state of knowledge management (KM) has not emerged yet.Over the past four years, the ongoing development of a PKM concept and prototype system has been accompanied by over 30 multidisciplinary peer-reviewed publications. To verify the undertaking, dedicated articles have applied accepted general design science research (DSR) guidelines aimed at creating innovative IT artefacts (that extend human and social capabilities and meet desired outcomes), at validating design processes (as evidence of their relevance, utility, rigor, resonance and publishability) and at ensuring theory effectiveness (a matter of purposeful utility, content, communication and presentation).Based on the formation of individuals’ autonomous PKM capacities and personal devices nourished by networked creative conversations, the novel PKM approach, on the one hand, aims at advancing lifelong PKM support and academic and professional growth benefiting individuals as contributors and beneficiaries of institutional and societal performance. On the other hand, the scope of anticipated outcomes also offers appealing opportunities for further stakeholders engaged in the context of curation, education, research, development and business. In the latter context, prior papers have looked at the impact for large enterprises in regard to organizational knowledge management (OKM) system generations, the potential of a fruitful OKM–PKM–Co-evolution, and the promises for strengthening organisational capabilities of innovativeness and leadership.The focus of this article shifts to the collaborative and growth-related challenges of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It pinpoints the entrepreneurial barriers of organisational development, and how the PKM concept and its technological and educational devices are able—as any SME moves through its dynamic stages of growth, predicaments or decline—to guide and rectify the associated tasks and problems. These demands necessitate performing effectively under growing pressures and communicating with rising numbers of internal and external stakeholders, as affirmed in Garnsey’s resource-based notion of new firm growth, Greiner’s evolution–revolution-based stage-growth model, and Levie’s and Lichtenstein’s dynamic states approach to entrepreneurship.