The contemporary globalisation of economic activities has enormously accelerated the pace of innovation and technology development throughout the world. Continuous transformation of the marketplace and tremendous growth of demand on knowledge-intensive products and services has led to further evolution of knowledge management and project management studies. Increasing number of research done on knowledge management aspects within project environment evidences the expanding interest on the two areas of study. Incubators, representing the accumulators of knowledge management practices which facilitate the innovation and entrepreneurship through start-up projects, encompass vast number of issues for investigation related to the mentioned study areas. Past researches done in incubator field mainly concerned with the knowledge management aspects, neglecting the project management perspectives on it. Only few articles were found which refers to both fields of study within the incubators, although with an emphasis on project management models as catalysts of innovation. Our research basically aims to explore, examine and illustrate both knowledge management and project management interrelationship, in the context of incubators. It provides with a conceptual model, which depicts the contribution and correlation of project management, organisational knowledge management and project specific knowledge management. Based on the observation and analysis of the empirical data collected using the IT knowledge-based risks model as our methodological framework, it was found that incubators do not share the same knowledge management challenges as IT companies. Combining the conceptual model derived from the findings of literature review, and the methodological framework, we developed a new model representing knowledge management challenges in the management of start-up projects within incubators. Out of ten challenges observed in the IT sector, our research finds eight main challenges in incubators that are related to knowledge management. According to the perceptions of the interviewees chosen from a sample of three incubators in Sweden, the main challenges are (i) handling business coach exit, (ii) communicating lessons learned, (iii) creating knowledge map, (iv) establishing knowledge network, (v) selecting appropriate team, (vi) storing knowledge from previous projects, (vii) integrating different expertise and (viii) transferring complete knowledge. Each of the mentioned challenges was placed in each of the three domains defined in the conceptual model, in order to accentuate the domain it directly affects or is mostly affected by.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-39983 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Karapetyan, Ani, Otieno, Rosemary |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Handelshögskolan vid Umeå universitet, Umeå universitet, Handelshögskolan vid Umeå universitet |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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