Resumen de El impacto de la gestión del conocimiento y las tecnologías de información en la innovación: un estudio en las pyme del sector agroalimentario de Cataluña
The current economic environment is characterized mainly by global competition, rapid technological developments, product life cycles becoming increasingly shorter, consumers increasingly demanding and changes in organizational structures of corporations. In this area, the innovative capacity of the company becomes imperative The literature points factors and / or conditions that must be taken in order to encourage and foster innovation, which include the practices of knowledge management (KM) and information technology (IT), decided to approach this research in these two factors.
The increasing attractiveness of these issues is evident, considering the abundance of published works on KM and IT and their impacts on business innovation in the specialized magazines, however it should be noted that the theoretical studies have been more numerous than those who support their arguments with empirical evidences. If we consider the business environment for SMEs, the paucity of empirical works is even more remarkable.
In this sense, this paper aims to be original to provide empirical evidence of the importance of KM (through the SECI model developed by Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) and IT in the innovative results of SME's. From this purpose, was raised and covered the following general objective: The construction of an explanatory model that involves KM practices, innovation and IT. Specifically, the study focuses on the impact of KM practices, considering IT, on the innovative performance of SME's in the agri-food sector in Catalonia.
This objective is reflected in other more specific as: The identification and description of KM practices and those related to innovation as well as the uses being made of IT.
The bidimensional analysis of the three main elements involved (KM, IT and innovation).
The methodological approach followed in the investigation, focuses on establishing a set of assumptions made from the literature review and set up the theoretical model. For obtaining the information developed multidimensional scales that tried to measure so complete each of the variables considered. The statistical processing of data includes a series of analyses, such as variance, consistency, factorial, conglomerates and simple and multiple regression, which were conducted with SPSS version 11.0.
The thesis is basically composed of two parts: the theoretical part comprises the first five chapters that presents a review of the fundamental theoretical concepts on which is based related this investigation, and the empirical part, integrated of the following two chapters, where are presented the research model and research methodology followed, in addition to the empirical results obtained during the investigation. The thesis ends with the presentation of research findings as: SME's engaged KM practices, although the vast majority do so not formalized, emphasizing those activities that refer only to explicit knowledge.
Despite the importance of innovation, companies surveyed are not characterized by predominantly be innovative, at least in the formal or planned sense, although there are customer-oriented action and improving the efficiency, which designed and executed under the supervision and / or participation by the owner/manager, could be considered innovations. Similarly, IT is recognized as a competitive tool, however its use is directed primarily to the field of traditional management activities and efficiency improvements and access to knowledge (not spread).
It was observed influence of KM and IT on innovation performance, but this is not relevant in statistical terms. In fact, when analyzing these elements separately, it was found that KM has a causal, meaningful and relevant relationship on innovation, unlike IT observed minimal effect, both in innovation and in KM.
