Systemic analysis, knowledge management and innovative SMEs », by Pierre Saulais*
Organizational innovation in innovative SMEs can be elaborated through different axes that require both a prior reversal of thinking, an ability to apprehend complexity, and a strong support from the corporate management team.
In a firm with intense knowledge activities, one of these axes can take the form of a corporate project consisting in designing and deploying in the SME a global knowledge management plan (KM) shared by all the actors by injecting » the KM spirit” within them. The challenges of KM are to ensure the development, sustainability and effectiveness of the strategic knowledge of the innovative SME, in order to maintain the quality and relevance of its expertise, in an anticipatory vision of needs and to promote the transfer of knowledge between the actors.
In addition, companies with a « start-up spirit » are predisposed to optimizing the benefit of the systemic approach, the implementation of which constitutes a second axis of organizational innovation. Systemic analysis has the capacity to take into account the whole system integrating an individual, an element or a problem considered, in order to apprehend it by the interactions that it maintains with the other elements of the same system. In this, it allows to take on something that appears both complex and familiar, like our relationship to a corpus of knowledge.
Furthermore, taking into account the dimension of creative stimulation brought by the methodological principles of intellectual property as regards its approach of identifying originality and inventiveness represents a third axis of organizational innovation.
These different axes of organizational innovation are proving to be rich in operational applications, for instance in problem solving, in building entrepreneurial value systems, in systemic modeling of industrial activity, in learning systems, in reasoned system of knowledge.
See the special issue of the journal Technology & Innovation: http://www.openscience.fr/Numero-1-365
* Institut Mines Telecom and IKI-SEA (Institute for Knowledge and Innovation South East Asia, Bangkok University)
