How could knowledge management support innovation in small to medium-sized enterprises in the UK energy sector?

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.