Knowledge Management – from its Inception to the Innovation Linkage

Abstract

Knowledge management started to be perceived as a scientific discipline relatively recently. Since its beginnings in the 1990s, the interest for this research field has been constantly growing especially in the past two decades. However, it seems that the peak of interest has already passed. In this paper, we provided the review of the most important research documents that are related with this topic, all collected from the Web of Science. The most important scholars and journals in the field are identified via documents and citations among them. In addition, the purpose of this paper is also to analyse the existing linkage between knowledge management and innovation. For this purpose, a network of keywords was constructed with keywords performing as actors in the network and the co-occurrence as a relation. The network obtained of keywords is undirected and weighted by the number of documents in which adjacent keywords which co-occurred on the topic of knowledge management. The content analysis with traditional network analytic techniques was used. In other fields, similar methods were already applied; however, this is the first attempt to construct this kind of research in knowledge management related to the topic of innovation. The results revealed significant linkage between knowledge management and innovation in the documents which were analyzed. We believe that the network analytic procedures used in this paper provide an excellent tool to study such a relevant phenomenon.