Customer knowledge management in SMEs: Review and research agenda

Abstract

Customer knowledge is one of the most noteworthy assets for firms to manage in order to improve their products and gain competitive advantage while meeting the customer needs. Customer knowledge management (CKM) arises when firms see the significance of customers as a source of firm's knowledge. More importantly, customers alter from passive product receiver into active knowledge partners and generate co‐created knowledge with firms. However, despite the popularity of promoting entrepreneurship and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) for economic development, research studies, examining CKM in the context of SMEs, are relatively small and diverse. In this paper, the authors discuss the concept of CKM from a comprehensive literature review as well as other related concepts that are anticipated to have relationships with CKM in SMEs, namely knowledge‐oriented leadership (KOL), trust in management, and firm performance. A thorough analysis of past research confirms that the existing literature in this area is highly fragmented. By integrating the main findings of relevant research streams, a detailed overview of the literature on CKM in the context of SMEs is established, and a research agenda is set up.

Customer knowledge orientation as a key to business model innovation of free-to-fee switch

“…Third, for the six main propositions and a total of 12 sub-propositions proposed in the conceptual model of free-to-fee switch, even if they are supported by similar research evidence in previous literatures, most of them are not consistent with our findings. Therefore, it can be divided into three categories to illustrate: the model has clear support evidence from previous literature, which is consistent with our findings, including P2 (Varadarajan, 2020), P5 (Katila and Ahuja, 2002; Luo et al , 2018), P6 (Sheth et al , 2020), P6a and P6d (Liu and Atuahene-Gima, 2018); there are similar studies in the previous literature, and some cases have similar research evidence but are not completely consistent, including P1 (Mustak et al , 2021), P1a (Durst and Runar Edvardsson, 2012; Zawaideh et al , 2018), P1c (Johansson et al , 2019), P3 (Zaim et al , 2018), P4 (Petrakis and Kostis, 2012), P6b (Chaithanapat and Rakthin, 2020) and P6c (Chen and Huan, 2020; Chaithanapat and Rakthin, 2020); and no similar literature has been found so far, including P1b and P1d . …”

“…Lisa Holme said that the company believes that the original content is the performance of the "brand definition," the license plan is to enable subscribers to enjoy in daily entertainment, which is critical to the success of Hulu (IDM 7, 2-3). Previous literature illustrates that efficient customer knowledge management is the basis of enterprises to expand customer knowledge to establish valuable customer relationships and strengthen customer loyalty (Chaithanapat and Rakthin, 2020). Therefore, the research proposed the following proposition:…”

The Influence of Knowledge Management Capacities on Pharmaceutical Firms Competitive Advantage: The Mediating Role of Supply Chain Agility and Moderating Role of Inter Functional Integration

“…Empirical evidence shows increasing openness toward knowledge that is gained from past experiences on which a decision is made to improve firm performance ( 25 ). company can attain CA by having prior knowledge, experience, and skills that will add to the knowledge base and help in decision making regarding what is needed for the firm to improve its internal processes, products, and services ( 26 ).…”

Guest editorial

“…Defined as beliefs, commitment, viewpoints, purpose and action (Nonaka, 1994), firm-level knowledge is regarded as a core competency and a relevant source of competitive advantage (CA) and value creation in the short term (Chaithanapat and Rakthin, 2021) that pushes continuous improvements and results in higher performance in the long run for firms (Liu et al , 2019; Martins et al , 2019). Because knowledge is an intangible as well as a complex to understand and to share element among the different departments (Martins et al , 2019), a proper management of knowledge is required to facilitate the availability for different internal agents of all the knowledge in an organization (Barley et al , 2018; Dayan et al , 2017; Santoro et al , 2018).…”