Managing knowledge in industrial markets has become an increasingly important task in the last 10 years. Many industrial firms paid little attention to the topic, since it was felt that knowledge was easily handled internally and was a simple process. The growth of information technology that centered on the collection, analysis and dissemination of information during the 1990's and early 2000's has necessitated that managing knowledge be taken seriously by industrial marketing managers. By doing so industrial firms can make available increased knowledge content in the development and provision of products and services to industrial marketing managers on all levels of the firm, achieve shorter new product development cycles, and facilitate and manage organizational innovation and learning. This article outlines the new dimensions in knowledge management in industrial marketing that are important for industrial managers, academic researchers, and business firms to understand for the future.
Knowledge management is a relatively new field in the world of business, since it started in the mid 1990's with the growth of the Internet and the development of large data warehouses and data mining technologies in business firms. Defining knowledge management is not easy because it can refer to several different activities in an industrial firm, such as data collection, data analysis, data storage, data dissemination, and data utilization. Alberthal described knowledge management as being “Like water or a rising tide of data [that] can be viewed as an abundant, vital and necessary resource. With enough preparation, [a firm] should be able to tap into that reservoir – and ride the wave – by utilizing new ways to channel raw data into meaningful information. That information, in turn, can then become the knowledge that leads to wisdom.” (Alberthal, 1995). Fleming views knowledge itself as a continuum. An industrial firm begins with data collection which is just information that is meaningless with respect to a point in space and time. “It is like an event out of context, a letter out of context, a word out of context. The key concept here, being ‘out of context.’ And, since it is out of context, it is without a meaningful in relation to anything else.” (Fleming, 1997) When an industrial firm collects a piece of data, and if it gets management's attention at all, the tendency is usually to attempt to find a way to attribute meaning to it and to determine if it can be used to improve management decision making. The information is then aggressively associated with other projects, events, or on-going research and development situations to try to establish its worth to the organization. More simply, if an industrial marketing manager reviews data in a report that can be immediately associated with another data set regarding the status of a particular project that he or she is managing, there is a tendency to immediately form associations with other on-going or past projects within the firm. If the data has no context, there is little or no meaning. The industrial marketing manager then creates context which may be based on a solid relationship or conjecture, yet it provides meaning for the information (Fleming, 1997).
Correctly managing knowledge in industrial organizations is an important factor for future success in domestic and international markets. As pointed out in this issue of Industrial Marketing Management, knowledge management is a multi-dimensional area with many critical areas that the industrial marketing manager should understand to better manage the industrial firm. As the amount of information increases due to the advances in information technology, industrial firms will have to adapt their knowledge management systems to insure that the critical information is directed to the important decision makers in companies and that appropriate strategies emerge to increase market share, enhance customer value and improve profit performance.
