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The knowledge management process is crucial in fostering and sustaining competitive innovation processes that create economic and social value through the generation, development and implementation of ideas. These new ideas are behind the production of new or significantly improved products and processes. The organisations which have readily adopted and implemented KM are found to be the larger, well financed and better resourced organisations. There are many success stories of KM in large organisations, but these have not been replicated in Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). This study explores how KM could be used in SMEs to support innovation. The research question was further divided into three research objectives: What are the KM goals of SMEs? What are the Innovation goals of SMEs? What association is their between KM and Innovation in SMEs which could be further explored? The research design for the project is based on a deductive research approach composed by an extensive literature review, to express an informed conceptual model, and a sector wide questionnaire survey, to identify issues emerging from practice. The questionnaire uses a purposively theoretical/conceptual model (KMOLI Cycle) deduced from the literature review. The model was improved by mapping it against KM- Innovation activities. The questionnaire tests aims to identify issues or discrepancies between the theoretical/conceptualisation and actual KM- Innovation activities. This deductive approach questioned a universe of 400 UK SMEs from the UK Energy Sector. This report presents the findings of the questionnaire as well as the findings of research project as a whole. It was found that SMEs are surprisingly innovation and KM active but lack a strategic perspective for both KM and innovation. The questionnaire highlighted a number of discrepancies for further exploration.

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With the rise in importance of technology to organizational life, a lot of attention has been given to the management of knowledge through technological applications (Chou and Lin, 2002). At the same time, a wide spectrum of social interactionist literature has argued for the importance of human agency in the creation, conversion and sharing of knowledge (cf Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Brown and Duguid, 2001; Dixon, 2002 and Chiva and Alegre, 2005). Given the amount of research on the importance of social interaction to the management of individual and organizational knowledge, it becomes imperative to develop a clear understanding of the role of the individual in these social interaction processes. This research begins with first principles by exploring the dynamics of knowledge sharing in organizations from the perspective of individual agents, in order to gain insight into the reasoning behind the action of individuals in sharing their knowledge and expertise. In so doing, the research assumes that the knowledge transfer process is essentially a social process and entails an active involvement of individual actors in making decisions about the sharing process. The empirical setting for this research is a single case study of Construct Co., an organization in the construction industry. Primary data was collected by in-depth interviews of a sample population of 27 respondents with additional secondary data drawn from company annual reports and in-house survey. By taking a qualitative interpretive approach (Morgan, 1979; Morgan & Smircich, 1980) and drawing on a theoretical framework that centres on Bourdieu's concepts of capital and habitus (Bourdieu, 1977,1985,1986), and the concept of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Brown and Duguid, 1991,2001), this thesis not only provides an exploratory insight into the determinants which govern individual knowledge sharing decision processes but also contributes to research on the practical utility of the habitus as both a conceptual and analytical tool in understanding the dynamics governing individual knowledge sharing decisions.

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The importance of capturing and sharing useful knowledge from construction projects has been recognised by the construction industry. However, issues such as the loss of important insights due to the time lapse in capturing the knowledge, the need for sharing the knowledge captured as soon as possible in order to maximise the benefits brought about by reusing the knowledge, and the need to share the knowledge before the opportunities for reusing the knowledge diminish have not been adequately addressed. To address this, it is crucial for knowledge to be captured as soon as possible once it is created or identified (i.e. 'live') in a collaborative environment, and presented in a format that will facilitate its reuse during and after the project. This research was aimed at developing a methodology that facilitates the `live' capture and reuse of project knowledge in construction. An extensive literature review was first conducted on the concept of knowledge management and the current practices for managing project knowledge. Subsequently, case studies involving six companies were carried out to investigate the shortcomings of current practice and the end-user requirements for the capture and reuse of project knowledge. These requirements informed the development of the methodology for `live' capture and reuse of project knowledge. The Web IS Development Methodology (Avison and Fitzgerald, 2003) employing ASP. NET 2.0 was adopted to encapsulate the methodology into a Web-based prototype application. The evaluation of the prototype revealed that the methodology can enable project knowledge to be captured and shared `live' across different organisations without significant additional workload and costs. It is concluded that the `live' capture and reuse of project knowledge in construction is important in preventing knowledge loss and helping to harness the project knowledge captured. A combination of both KM technologies and techniques is essential for the effective management of tacit and explicit knowledge. The prototype application developed can facilitate the `live' capture and reuse of project knowledge as shown by the results of the evaluation. There is scope for enhancing this study by exploring the integration of the prototype application with other information systems, and the use of software agents to automatically locate useful knowledge from the Internet and project extranets. The methodology developed will help construction organisation to leverage their knowledge in a timely way to meet the challenge of today's fast evolving world.