Research On Knowledge Audit Methods For Product Innovation

As the main business activities, product innovation is one of the enterprise's most knowledge intensive processes. But the survey shows that the success rate of product innovation and the success rate of knowledge management (KM) of Fortune 500 is low. A recent research of KM practice shows that the knowledge audit (KA) is the key to the success of KM. Thus, the research on the KA methods based on the enterprise's product innovation activity, can provide the diagnosis of knowledge resource status for enterprise's product innovation ability, and identify the topic of knowledge gap for the product innovation project besides providing the correspondent make up policy.This thesis achieves the work in the following four parts:Firstly, the reviews of the theory on product innovation, KM, KA are presented, and the importance of KA is clarified. Then the concept of the KA is broaden, and the concept of KA for product innovation is proposed. The research framework for KA method for product innovation is presented at last.Secondly, the product innovation stages and its processes are anglicized, and theme knowledge of product innovation is summarized. Then, the knowledge elements within the product innovation are analyzed systematic and in-depth, including its form and hierarchy, external and internal owner, knowledge flows, knowledge circumstance.Thirdly, a KA indicator system for enterprise's product innovation, is established which consists of six primary indicators and a number of secondary indicators. Then, the assessment method for the KA indicator system is proposed, and the determination of the indicator's weight is discussed. At last, an application of the KA evaluation indicator system is presented.Finally, the product innovation project-oriented KA process model is presented, and the model is explained in detail. Then the themes, principle and conceptual model of product innovation knowledge map is presented in detail. After that, the analysis of knowledge gap and its make up policy is presented from the view of explicit/tacit knowledge and knowledge circumstance respectively.