THE NEXUS BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND INNOVATION. A LITERATURE REVIEW

Knowledge management is the new managerial discipline whose aim is to support the processes of knowledge exploitation, memorization, re-use and learning. Therefore, it can be said that knowledge management has, implicitly or explicitly, a strong relationship with innovation management. Despite this fact, knowledge management and innovation management have developed into two separate fields and two distinct contexts of research. Starting from these assumptions, the purpose of this paper is to examine how the connection between knowledge management (KM) and innovation management has been developed in the last 10 years. In order to achieve our goal, an etic approach is employed which encompasses an external view of meaning associations and real-world events. The research combines the qualitative with the quantitative perspective and the whole multi-stage process is dominated by an inductive approach. The analysis focuses on 894 articles that were published in knowledge management and innovation journals, mostly indexed in Scopus and Thomson Reuters databases, during 2006 - 2016. The main results prove that there is a strong connection between KM and innovation management although the number of KM journals that approach topics related to innovation is higher than the number of innovation journals that focus on knowledge-related issues. The concept of "innovation" is by far the most used in the analyzed KM papers, while the term of "knowledge" is frequently used as a generic keyword in the Innovation papers; only a few papers are about a specific topic such as product development, project management, and process improvement - in the case of KM journals - or organizational learning, social capital, and human capital - in the case of Innovation journals. The research findings have both theoretical and practical implications. On the one hand, it synthesizes how the link between knowledge management and innovation management evolved in the last 10 years. On the other hand, it may serve as a handbook of managerial guidelines; it brings forward the knowledge management approaches and tools which can be used for product or process innovations.