The Importance Of Knowledge Management To Achieve Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Abstract

The aim of this study is to clarify the knowledge management concept and to indicate the strategical importance of the knowledge management activities for organizations to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Today a new economic fact has been experienced and the main characteristics of this new context are globalization, rapid changes of the products and markets, and an aggressive competition among organizations. The new economic era is defined as the "Knowledge Economy" because of the fact that knowledge is the main strategic resource for the organizations to achieve sustainable competitive advantage in the national and global markets, today. The reason of why knowledge is the most important strategic resource is that organizations have to acquire, assimilate, use, assess and create knowledge to overcome the rapid changes and the aggressive competition around them. In order to make use of the knowledge strategically, organizations should manage it. Managing knowledge includes two main approaches behind. The first approach is a process approach. Knowledge management is accepted as a process of acquiring, assimilating, sharing, using, assessing and creating knowledge. The second approach is system approach. Knowledge management is accepted as a system of knowledge strategies, knowledge plans, implementation of these plans and knowledge management performance itself. There are also other approaches in the literature. But whatever approach it is, the aim of managing knowledge is to enable higher organizational performance and by this mean to help the organizations to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Therefore knowledge management has been considered as a new and an important topic in the strategic management literature.