Enhancing university research activities with knowledge management.

Abstract

In the new economy, innovation is regarded as one of the solutions for almost every organisation to survive in the new business era. Universities, especially in terms of research activities, are no difference since they strive for novelties which potentially lead to innovation. An experienced researcher in the university has continually created tacit knowledge in a specific domain, but typically found it difficult to share this tacit knowledge among other researchers for the problem solving purpose. To overcome this problem and to better stimulate knowledge sharing activities among university researchers, Knowledge Management and Knowledge Engineering, particularly KADS, are utilised in this paper to assist a group of different domain researchers in putting their experiences together. In this way, each researcher can make explicit his or her tacit knowledge into KADS task, inference and domain knowledge models. The structured knowledge models captured from different researchers can then be merged together. In this paper, the research in Knowledge Management is selected as a case study, and the results show that the relevant tacit knowledge has been made explicit from a researcher and allow other researchers to share the knowledge as well as to add their own knowledge. Hence, their common research theme is effectively created, and also maintained by a group of researchers