Knowledge Management and Innovation: A study in the Chinese high-tech industry

In the fierce competition economy environment, the Chinese high-tech companies have to maintain continuous innovation, in order to adapt to the rapid change of technology and customers’ demand. Simultaneously, the knowledge-intense era requires the companies to enhance the capability of creation and utilization knowledge. Therefore, both innovation and knowledge management (KM) bring company competitive advantages for sustaining development. In this condition, the integration of innovation and KM has become an important topic in academic studies. The objective of this research is to investigate the influential factors to KM and the impact of KM on innovation process. This research applies both quantitative and qualitative strategies by combining the methods of questionnaire and interview to collect data. Then using statistical analysis software SPSS analyzes the collected data. Through the quantitative analysis, the research finds that IT system, organizational structure and incentive system are all positively correlated to knowledge sharing and knowledge creation. IT system and incentive system make the contribution to the prediction of knowledge sharing, while organizational structure cannot. IT system makes the strongest unique contribution to knowledge sharing. In addition, all of the three factors make the contribution to the prediction of knowledge creation. Incentive system makes the strongest unique contribution to knowledge creation. From the analysis, and discussion of interview, the research finds that organizational culture, management system and the significance of employees also have positive impact on KM. In addition, KM positively influences innovation. Also, the research interprets the difficulties of implementation KM in Chinese high-tech companies and provides some advices on how to improve the performance of KM in innovation process.