INTRODUCTION

RENATA JANOŠCOVÁ
Vysoká škola manažmentu v Trenčíne,Bratislava, Slovakia


JOZEF HVORECKÝ
Vysoká škola manažmentu v Trenčíne, Bratislava, Slovakia, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

On this CD you find the electronic version of the contributions presented at the International Workshop on Knowledge Management (IWKM) organized by Vysoká škola manažmentu (School of Management) in Bratislava on 20 and 21 October 2016.

The series of workshops started in 2006. Its main aim is to support building a network of researchers, to give them room for presenting their newest research results, and to inspire them to develop their knowledge by exchanging their ideas and thought. The first two years it ran as a national Slovak event. Between 2008 and 2010, IWKM became a part of Summer School „Introduction to Knowledge Management“ – a collaborative ERASMUS activity for students from Czech Republic, Finland, Lithuania and Slovakia. Since then it is an international event. In 2015 our workshop was a part of a larger scientific event named EAI International Conference on Mobility Opportunities in Danube Region (where EAI stands for European Alliance for Innovation). As the conference moved from Bratislava, 11th IWKM in 2016 is again organized as a separate scientific event.

IWKM did not return to its previous format fully. It has obtained another innovative mode – it started with two pre-conference seminars targeting not only researchers but also a wider audience:

Petr Berka and Renata Janošcová organized Big Data seminar. Its aim was to spread awareness about this innovative method of obtaining knowledge from large data sets and to demonstrate practical examples in Slovak business practice done by Miroslav Koseček and Michal Rosik.

Jozef Hvorecký and Lenka Filkaszová prepared a seminar named Knowledge Management as an Education Tool. It shows the importance of exploiting Knowledge Management concepts and rules for making teaching and learning more practical and giving to the students a feeling of practicality of their knowledge.

Their introductory speeches, slides and other relevant materials are included to this proceedings.

Sonia Ferenčíková sr. and Sonia Ferenčíková jr. contribute to Knowledge Management applications by their analysis of Uppsala model of internationalization and the role of knowledge in internationalization process of companies. They conclude that globalization, ICT technologies, Internet, company networks, nature of the products and services changed dramatically the internationalization framework. Regardless those seemingly dramatic changes, basic rules and principles in this domain have stayed unchanged.

In her contribution, Lenka Filkaszová pays attention to communities of practice. She defines them, shows their distinction from social networks and gives real-word examples from the. In the end, she makes some predictions on their future development.

Jana Hrdličková points to the fact that the right knowledge management practices develop and leverage the potential of knowledge and help the organizations to stregthen their position.At the same time, there is time to study a relationship between these practices and various performance indicators such as productivity, effectivity, customer retention or direct financial results of company including return on investment, revenues and profit. Disclosing (some of) relations might help to managers to apply a right method in the right time.

Renata Janošcová in her paper discusses Big Data – a new category of business analysis. In particular, she shows WEKA, a tool tak can be used for a variety of investigation methods that can be used for both effective knowledge discovery as well as for making predictions.

The article of Alena Lipovská describes the possibilities of Knowledge-Management-based innovations that the businesses can implement in their Human Resources department. In the first part of the paper, the general 3 11th IWKM 2016, October 20 – 21, 2016, Bratislava, Slovakia possibilities are described and their advantages are presented. As a conclusion, three ways of how to implement relevant IT solutions are offered.

Ilkka Mikkonen, Jonna Nikula, Oona Huoponen, Milla Parviainen regularly studies behavior of student teams. In our proceedings, they deepens our knowledge on chosen knowledge transfer models and presents two real life cases from university environment in Finland: one from Oulu University and the other from Oulu University of Applied Sciences.

Martin Miller opens in his contribution an interesting problem – to coach or not to coach. He studied effect on couching in his company. Despite his initial expectations, the coaching itself did not improved its economic parameters. Nevertheless, it has a very positive effect to human resources dropout rate. Read his paper for other interesting details.

In her contribution, Alena Piknová analyzes people’s motivation to their knowledge development. She asks questions like: What motivates people to be interested in gaining new knowledge? Despite the fact that similar questions will hardly be ever answered completely, unfolding some indicators can be very useful.

Gradual continuous improvement is the subject of Michal Pružinský and Mariusz Iskra contribution. They argue that having small improvements is fine, but a sensible company builds a culture of continuous improvement. Only this approach can yield substantial results to improve the overall business over time. As there is no single model of improvement activities, every enterprise system has to develop one tailored to specific conditions. At the same time, many features of such models are similar. The paper concentrate on those based on the implementation of the Kaizen method.

Eva Rakovská solves in her paper the problems caused by the fast development the Internet, mobile technologies and other IT (grid, web services, cloud etc.). Sometimes it is too difficult to connect a traditional perception of the management with a turbulent and very fast changing IT environment. The paper sketches hidden aspects of Knowledge management which should be oriented on right coverage of the knowledge life cycle by IT within the enterprise. As the main task of knowledge managers she sees building bridges between software and people.

In Monika Šestáková contribution, a specific category of knowledge workers – specialists in the financial sector – is analyzed. She points to the fact that the knowledge intensity of the financial sector increases and the share of work places requiring lower knowledge is declining. The financial specialists are therefore supposed to flexibly acquire and use their (mainly tacit) knowledge of local conditions and respect specific requirements of the basic segments of local clients.

Collaborative consumption is the key concern of Mária Tajtáková’s paper. From the marketing perspective the collaborative consumption represents a hybrid marketing model of peer-to-peer exchange. As it runs on the online market, it has to apply online marketing techniques. Her main aim is to discuss new trends in collaborative consumption from the view of disruptive market exchange modes.

Andrea Zacharová concentrated her research on The relationship between R&D expenditures and productivity in studies on industry and/or firm level – review. She monitored the methods and models and compared their independent and dependent variables. She showed that in most of the studies the positive relationship between investment in R&D and increased productivity has been proven.

As the editors, we would like to express our gratitude to all authors for their efforts in preparing their contributions as well as for their participation in discussions to the presentations of their colleagues at the workshop in Bratislava. Their involvement makes the IWKM an unusually vivid event – and is the biggest reward to us.

Our special thanks to all members of Program Committee and of Organizing Committee for successful run of the event, in particular to Sonia Ferenčíková, Monika Šestáková and Michal Pružinský who have intensively collaborated with us on reviewing the published papers.

Trenčín and Bratislava, 1 November 2016

 

Renata Janošcová & Jozef Hvorecký