Managing Knowledge Assets for Business Performance Improvement

In today’s economy more and more organisations are realizing that to acquire and maintain their competitive advantage they must explicitly manage their cognitive resources. For this reason, managers need to understand how they can identify and evaluate existing knowledge assets within the organisation and how to manage these assets in order to achieve the competitive advantage. The relevant problem is that many organisations frequently embark on knowledge management initiatives without a clear idea of what business benefit they could expect. In such a prospect, this paper aims to explore a fundamental issue at the basis of the reasons for the implementation of Knowledge Management initiatives within companies, that is business performance improvement. In particular, the research provides a framework which aims to drive management in planning and evaluating a KM initiative focused on the improvement of a specific business performance.