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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of knowledge management (KM) enablers on KM activities in the context of Malaysian small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The effects of organizational culture, transformational leadership, organizational structure, and technology utilization as infrastructural KM enablers are examined on KM activities as knowledge acquisition, knowledge conversion, application, and protection.

A total of 227 responses from SMEs’ top management are used to assess the measurement and structural models applying partial least squares-structural equation modeling.

The results show that technology utilization and organizational structure are two main factors in KM activities (all structural relationships are supported). Surprisingly, organizational culture is only associated with knowledge conversion and protection and the findings indicate no relationships between organizational culture and knowledge acquisition and application. The results also indicate a positive relationship between transformational leadership and knowledge acquisition and the hypotheses on the association between transformational leadership and knowledge conversion, application, and protection are rejected.

The results of importance-performance map analysis (IPMA) imply that technology utilization has the highest importance on knowledge acquisition, conversion, and protection while organizational structure has the highest importance on knowledge application. The results of IPMA also show that organizational culture has the highest performance on all KM activities.

This study is amongst the few that examines the structural relationships between organizational factors and KM activities in a SME context.

The use of knowledge in organizations is largely a discretionary behavior that can be encouraged but not demanded. As such, the firm can only attempt to provide the right conditions for employees to endorse the role of knowledge workers. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the organization of the firm affects knowledge management.

This research proposes a new framework showing the prescriptive role of organizational characteristics onto knowledge management (KM) initiatives. Based on this framework, data were generated from nine semi‐structured interviews conducted in the American, British and Japanese offices of a major Japanese pharmaceutical company, using a Boolean approach and qualitative content analysis.

Organizational characteristics, specifically – structure, membership, relationship, and strategy affect KM, namely – knowledge acquisition, storage, diffusion, and application respectively.

Even though the departments of each local office under study were matched in terms of activity, the size of their own domestic market made comparisons sometimes challenging.

This research suggests that practitioners can increase the yield of KM when integrated upstream into the elementary business processes rather than when left voluntary.

This paper uncovers a possible link between the firm's organizational characteristics and KM, and the new practical framework can be useful to both scholars and practitioners.

Recent models in firm theory assume that problems have to be solved for production to take place and that knowledge is the main input for problem-solving. This paper characterizes the relationship between the predictability of production prcesses and investment in knowledge.

This paper uses a theoretical model of firm theory to study investment in knowledge by a simplified one-layer firm with a stochastic technology, across different market structures, and develops a calibration exercise to illustrate the results.

Firms working closer to the production frontier (those with a larger efficient scale in perfect competition, facing a higher demand in monopoly or more competitive internationally in an open economy) react more in terms of investment in knowledge when problem predictability changes. Investment in knowledge becomes nearly insensitive to such changes for firms with a low output, i.e. those far from the frontier. A calibration exercise suggests that the elasticity of knowledge with respect to the predictability of problems was around 0.59 for the US economy for the period 1980–2020.

These are the first nonambiguous results on the relationship between the predictability of production processes and investment in knowledge and help understanding knowledge acquisition by different firms in distinct competitive environments.

The extent of defects within the construction sector is considerable. This not only has implications for final built products, but also impacts on remedial and repair work, time delays and additional cost. This research work aims to evaluate the success of applying knowledge engineering (KE) techniques to the domain of defect prediction focusing specifically on brickwork mortar. A structured approach is developed which relates to the prediction of defects on housing developments. Knowledge engineering techniques are assessed to facilitate the provision of domain knowledge readily accessible by design engineers and architects. The KE techniques are used as an alternative to the current methods, techniques and technologies used within the construction industry. This is achieved by assessment of the predictive approach to facilitate decreases in ‘quality losses’, i.e. decreases in pre‐mature failure and hence improved quality performance. Attention is also given to the consideration of complex defects to promote increased efficiency in communication and co‐ordination of information for design and building processes, thereby helping to reduce the cost of maintenance and repair work.

In an economy where firms compete for limited resources, focusing internally to boost efficiency and reduce waste is critical. In particular, the kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement in small sustainable increments has spread in the manufacturing industry with mixed results. However, the knowledge management requirements of kaizen have not yet been formalized for practitioners to easily check the necessary pre‐conditions of their organization. The objective of this paper is to explore the successful implementation of kaizen in terms of its organizational design and knowledge management preconditions.

Using a case‐study approach building on previous in‐depth research of New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) in Fremont, California, this study assesses the organizational and knowledge preconditions of kaizen.

The results show that the success of NUMMI may reside as much in Toyota's production system as in the alignment of kaizen and the organizational characteristics that support suitable knowledge management practices.

The findings highlight the need for practitioners who plan to implement kaizen to review their firm's organizational characteristics and knowledge management practices and ensure their congruence with the requirements of kaizen.

The paper shows how kaizen cannot be reduced to an add‐on grafted onto existing processes and aimed at temporarily fixing the bottom line. Instead, kaizen is deeply rooted in, and therefore strongly dependent on, the processes it intends to improve.

To propose a comprehensive and semi‐automatic method for constructing or updating knowledge organization tools such as thesauri.

The paper proposes a comprehensive methodology for thesaurus construction and maintenance combining shallow NLP with a clustering algorithm and an information visualization interface. The resulting system TermWatch, extracts terms from a text collection, mines semantic relations between them using complementary linguistic approaches and clusters terms using these semantic relations. The clusters are mapped onto a 2D using an integrated visualization tool.

The clusters formed exhibit the different relations necessary to populate a thesaurus or ontology: synonymy, generic/specific and relatedness. The clusters represent, for a given term, its closest neighbours in terms of semantic relations.

This could change the way in which information professionals (librarians and documentalists) undertake knowledge organization tasks. TermWatch can be useful either as a starting point for grasping the conceptual organization of knowledge in a huge text collection without having to read the texts, then actually serving as a suggestive tool for populating different hierarchies of a thesaurus or an ontology because its clusters are based on semantic relations.

This lies in several points: combined use of linguistic relations with an adapted clustering algorithm, which is scalable and can handle sparse data. The paper proposes a comprehensive approach to semantic relations acquisition whereas existing studies often use one or two approaches. The domain knowledge maps produced by the system represents an added advantage over existing approaches to automatic thesaurus construction in that clusters are formed using semantic relations between domain terms. Thus while offering a meaningful synthesis of the information contained in the original corpus through clustering, the results can be used for knowledge organization tasks (thesaurus building and ontology population) The system also constitutes a platform for performing several knowledge‐oriented tasks like science and technology watch, textmining, query refinement.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct research with children, who have different abilities from adults, in terms of language understanding and level of attention, is a challenging task, especially concerning novel interactive systems such as social robots. Consequently, self-reporting methods are often replaced or supplemented by observational methods that are usually carried out taking advantage of video recordings. However, some limitations make this approach challenging for studies conducted with groups of children in real-world environments, whose relevance is being addressed more and more frequently in human-robot interaction (HRI) research. Thus, there is a growing need for rigorous observation approaches in unstructured test environments.

This paper presents an alternative analysis approach, in relation to an experimental child-robot interaction (CRI) application, which was developed at the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, China. The proposed methodology is based on the analysis of video recordings of in-wild activities of children with a robot. The methodology has the aim of providing a framework to facilitate knowledge identification and structuring. It was implemented for experiment evaluation and validation purposes and to propose a reference structure for the organization of new experiments and the stimulation of new ideas and activities in the design process.

This methodology provides a logical structure, which can be used to identify the effectiveness or limits of design choices, pertaining to such aspects as the morphology or movement of robots or the choice of their specific role in education, all of which play crucial roles in the design process and could be improved to achieve better results. This structured identification is a practical implication for the design process, above all when it is oriented toward social robots and their interaction with children or elderly senile people. In this case, the outcomes were the identification of important elements of an experiment (psychological profiles of the involved children and possible problems or risks) and their impact on the design process.

The methodological approach, which structures and uses cognitive maps to elaborate multicriteria evaluation models, is not new to the operations research field (where it is defined as a multimethodology application of Soft OR), but it has not yet been applied in the field of HRI studies, to analyze children’s perception of a robot and to identify the factors that can affect a good CRI or to structure knowledge that can be shared to guide the design process of robots for the experience of children playing.

This study aims to investigate the factors from four dimensions that have an effect both on formal and informal knowledge sharing (FKS and IKS) and the relationship between knowledge sharing (KS) and task performance in Chinese manufacturing.

The structural equation modeling approach was applied to hypothesis testing according to the data collected from employees of manufacturing companies through the online questionnaire. A total of 530 valid responses were obtained.

The results indicate that level of knowledge structure, self-efficacy, leadership support and KS culture all have a significant positive effect on both FKS and IKS while trust only positively affects FKS and information technology support positively affects IKS. Both FKS and IKS positively contribute to the task performance of manufacturing companies.

This study merely considered the impact of six factors on KS from four perspectives. Consequently, the relationship between some important other factors and KS is not revealed. In addition, the results of this study indicate that there might be a more complicated relationship between these factors and KS than the model constructed by this study. Therefore, in future research, more influencing factors could be considered in the research framework, and a multilevel model, such as a model considering the mediation effect, could be further explored.

According to the results, both FKS and IKS play a significant role in promoting organizational task performance, which is worthy of attention by the managers of manufacturing companies. In addition, the relationship between the different factors and the FKS and IKS found in this study provides specific guidance for improving the organizational KS practice.

First, previous studies considered the construction of explicit KS and tacit KS models based on the content of KS while this study considered FKS and IKS from the perspective of the process and approach of KS. Second, this research has clearly defined the level of knowledge structure from the perspective of knowledge ontology and verifies the positive effect of this factor on KS, providing a new theoretical perspective for exploring KS factors.

This paper uses survey data to explore the impact of alternative wholesale‐retail structures (voluntary versus cooperative) on interfirm knowledge transfer. The results indicate that, relative to cooperative wholesalers, voluntary wholesalers exhibit more of the mechanisms necessary to facilitate interfirm knowledge transfer, including communication frequency, communication bidirectionality, and interpersonal relationships. The mechanisms of knowledge transfer are also directly related to the level of retailer knowledge attributed to the wholesaler, which is directly related to retailer performance.

This study investigates the integration of information technology (IT) competencies with organizational inclusion initiatives and its impact on firm performance. It examines the role of organizational inclusion in promoting knowledge management capability (KMC) and the moderating effect of approach and avoidance motivation on the relationship between KMC and operational performance.

The study is grounded in the resource orchestration theory (ROT), which conceptualizes the integration of IT competencies and organizational inclusion. It employs hierarchical regression analysis on data collected from 204 firms and 374 managerial respondents to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results indicate that IT competencies enhance the relationship between organizational inclusion and KMC. Additionally, the relationship between KMC and operational performance is weaker when employees exhibit higher levels of avoidance motivation.

This study offers theoretical and managerial insights for integrating IT competencies into organizational inclusion initiatives, providing guidance for organizations seeking to enhance their performance, with a specific focus on the relevance of China as the research context.

This study enriches the scholarly discourse by examining the underexplored integration of IT competencies with organizational inclusion, notably in the context of China. It illuminates the moderating role of motivation in the KMC-operational performance relationship, benefiting both academia and practitioners. Furthermore, this work extends the literature by demonstrating how combining organizational inclusion and IT competencies can enhance workplace KMC, connecting it to internal knowledge resources. Theoretical implications extend beyond organizational inclusion and IT to show the broader application potential of ROT in management and information systems.