SELECTION OF KM TOOLS TO SUPPORT INNOVATION PROCESS USING AHP

The continuously increasing pressure of competition and global markets is forcing organizations to become more innovative, with a view to increasing overall competitiveness (Tidd et al., 1997). Closely linked, but not synonymous, with innovation is the body of knowledge referred to collectively as Knowledge Management (KM). In this connection, knowledge is considered as a potential key competitive advantage, by helping to increase innovation within the organization (McAdam and McCreedy, 2000). In fact, to be innovative in highly competitive industries and global markets requires the effective use of KM. Effective KM has parallels with effective innovation. For innovation to take place, a company needs caring people who are willing to share for the greater good of the company and creative people who have the ability to turn ideas into practical products and services (Brand, 1998). The knowledge-based theory of the firm suggests that knowledge exists within the people, products, and processes and that knowledge is the organizational asset that enables sustainable competitive advantage in thus hyper-competitive environments (Alavi and Leidner, 1999). KM can be defined as a systematic discipline and set of approaches to enable information and knowledge to grow, flow and create value in an organization. Inside an organization KM is increasingly seen as a guide to develop a more organic and holistic way of understanding and exploiting the role of knowledge in the processes of managing and doing work. Successful and innovative organizations share certain characteristics which range from technology infrastructure to a strong belief in the value of knowledge sharing and collaboration. Technology has a fundamental role in the support of KM, because it can help barriers of time and distance to collapse, while those factors alone should not drive the acquisitions of technology. A vast number of tools to support KM are available in the software market: however, few works proposed a framework to aid in the evaluation and selection of KM tools (Ngai and Chan, 2005). Moreover, no framework currently exists to support the selection of a KM tool to sustain an innovation process.Moreover, since firm's KM tool selection and implementation are strictly related to its competitive strategy and the adopted strategy reflects management’s decision on how to respond to external reality (Zack, 1999), managerial perception should shape their evaluation criteria and expected benefits. To this purpose, strategic considerations by managers have revealed to be of the utmost importance: their experience and acquaintance with the context could effectively help in the selection of the most proper KM tool. In the light of these considerations, it has come out the exigency of a managerial model which could combine the most of the above cited demands. This paper is primarily concerned with providing such a methodology to select the KM tools that support innovation processes within organizations. Then, a categorization of KM tools supporting innovation processes is provided. We believe that this selection methodology will be extremely useful to many organization. This methodology is based on a decision support technique called Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in order to keep into consideration the strategic intangible assets and the specific context of the company. The methodology is based on pair-wise comparisons between several factors that affect the selection of the most appropriate KM tool to sustain an innovation process. The AHP to aid decision-making in evaluation KM tools sustaining innovation processes is implemented via case study.