KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ACTIVITIES IN SWEDISH AND ROMANIAN ORGANIZATIONAL ENVIRONMENTS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

In the knowledge-based economy, management literature started to focus on the competencies of companies and especially on their internal resources, mostly on the intangible ones. From this particular category of intangible resource, knowledge is, without doubt, the most important one. The new economy is granting a widely interest to so-called “knowledge society”, to the employee who owns the knowledge, to the intellectual capital and to the learning organizations. Information society in which humankind is living is defined as a knowledge society and, at the same time, as a society of organizations. In the recent years, the number of the so-called knowledge-based organizations has reached a phenomenal rate of growth. The stock price and the market value of these companies are continually rising each year. Along with knowledge organizations, knowledge management started to play an important role in building the business strategy. One of the merits of knowledge management resides in transforming individual knowledge into organizational knowledge.
The current paper underlines the importance of knowledge creation in knowledge management stages. For this, we have conducted a survey on companies situated in Sweden and Romania with the purpose of discovering the methods used in knowledge creation and management in both countries. The base of the study was represented by some interviews conducted in period October 2009 – February 2010 with managers and engineers who work in these organizations. The results revealed some patterns of knowledge creation in industrial area, which might differ in maturity in the two analyzed countries.
The paper is structured as follows: the first section, Introduction, underlines some aspects related to knowledge creation, knowledge management and knowledge society. Also, some characteristics of a knowledge based organization are presented. Due to the importance of the knowledge in the creation of the competitive advantage, in section two, the knowledge-support infrastructure components of knowledge creation is emphasized along with the K-Creation Belt. Section three focuses on the tools used for implementing knowledge strategies in organizational environments, especially on the common ways of mapping people knowledge. Section four presents the research methodology used some of the methods found in the Sweden and Romanian organizational environments. From these, collaborative research with academia, involvement of practitioners in academic activities, professional certification and training are presented in detail as they result from the conducted research. All the findings are presented in the framework of knowledge management and knowledge society.
The results of our study can be used to improve the areas which turned out to be valuable or to implement the methods which proved to be successful for the analyzed enterprises by other firms.