Preface

The global business environment is becoming more and more volatile due to recent geo-political, geo-economic, and geo-technological transformations. COVID-19 has further aggravated the business ecosystem and there is an increasing sense of insecurity worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed our thought process from a deterministic to a constructivist paradigm where knowledge management can enable policymakers to identify unexpected challenges and deal with them. Knowledge creation, transfer, and sharing are used across industries to improve performance. Organizations need to explore and exploit informal sources of sustainable competitive advantages. Effective knowledge management can contribute to the optimization of the use of available intangible resources and create value for organizations. This book presents nine chapters that address several issues of knowledge management from different perspectives.

In Chapter 1, Jorge Rodas-Osollo and Karla Olmos-Sánchez emphasize the importance of identifying and managing knowledge from informally structured domains in the medical treatment area where measurements of various parameters are taken at different times during and after treatment.

In Chapter 2, Peter Yao Lartey, Junguo Shi, Rupa Jaladi Santosh, Stephen Owusu Afriyie, Isaac Akolgo Gumah, Mansuur Husein, and Fatoumata Binta Maci Bah discuss the significance of tacit knowledge and how it affects organizational success. They emphasize how to promote knowledge transfer for organizational performance and innovation.

In Chapter 3, Catherine Inibhunu describes a collection of spatial-temporal knowledge management and sharing methods, highlighting existing shortcomings and proposing an overarching spatial-temporal knowledge processing framework named SESAT for designing effective spatial-temporal knowledge systems that can be effectively managed.

In Chapter 4, Poline Bala, Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer, and Tan Chong Eng emphasize the need for a balanced indigenous worldview of knowledge management and highlight how indigenous knowledge can become contextualized within contemporary problem-solving scenarios.

In Chapter 5, based on an action research design, Nathalie Fabbe-Costes presents a framework of industry-academia dynamic knowledge processes. She finds that knowledge creation results from three intertwined, interactive, and iterative processes: knowledge transfer, knowledge sharing, and knowledge generation.

In Chapter 6, Feng-Shang Wu, Chien-Hsin Wu, and Yi-Chih Yeh develop a holistic framework by investigating knowledge management activities and influencing factors of Contact Research Organizations (CRO).

In Chapter 7, Michel Grundstein emphasizes the role of tacit knowledge in decisionmaking in an era of uncertainty and volatility and develops a constructivist and socio-technical vision of knowledge management.

In Chapter 8, Andi Mursidi presents a model of the internal quality assurance system in universities using a knowledge management approach.

Finally, in Chapter 9, Elahe Hosseini, Mehdi Tajpour, and Muhammad Mohiuddin explore the role of knowledge employees in digital startups and how top management can ensure an organizational ecosystem where these employees can flourish and contribute to the competitive advantage of firms. They advocate that both conducive organizational culture and infrastructure of the organization are needed to fully explore and exploit knowledge employees' expertise and experience for organizational advantages.

The book presents nine interesting topics with in-depth analysis. We believe readers will find it useful for developing their understanding of knowledge management processes for organizational development.
