The role of knowledge protection in knowledge management success models

Abstract

The world is technologically advancing every day and innovations are coming up frequently. People only feel interested to know about those innovations which create some buzz in the market - the rest of the innovations lost in the bottomless cave of time. One of the primary reasons for such failure is innovators’ too much interest in protecting information related to the creation itself. Undoubtedly, the security of knowledge is vital for any invention, but being extensively protective, can also hamper the innovation process and keep the innovator in the dark about users’ expectations. Therefore, an innovator needs to determine the boundary of knowledge protection to become successful in commercializing any innovation. Although the present structure of knowledge management is very multifaceted, yet, its correlation with technology transfer is inherently evident. Therefore, the proposed solution will try to find out some theoretical background to establish a connection between knowledge protection and the knowledge management (KM) success model. The answer will try to discover the status of knowledge protection as a success factor of the knowledge management success model. A systematic literature review conducts to identify and evaluate the works of researchers, scholars in this field. The review starts with finding the right keywords to discover appropriate journals. Next, relevant articles need to obtain from those journals. Information applicable to the research topic emerges after reading the relevant journals. After the research, it becomes clear that knowledge protection doesn’t get the importance that the author expects while selecting the topic. Knowledge related success factors get less importance during the finding of knowledge management success factors. There are only three articles that appear during the research, where they acknowledge the security of knowledge. The almost same observation detects in the case of knowledge management success models. Most of the time, knowledge protection has not taken into account while developing these models. Only one model considers knowledge protection and another model indirectly acknowledges the importance of protection. Though the models consider user satisfaction widely, but the access to knowledge for the users and the barrier of getting that knowledge due to knowledge protection overlooks significantly.