Knowledge management stocks in Serbian small and mid-sized enterprises

Abstract

The study measures and analyzes the representation level of the knowledge management (KM) strategy in Serbian enterprises. KM is the skill of acquiring and allocating knowledge resources in order to achieve greater business efficiency and profitability of enterprises. The paper starts from Romer's (1986, 2018) theory of increasing yields. According to Romer, a stable growth is the result of endogenous accumulation of knowledge. The aim of this paper is to determine the extent to which elements of KM are represented in small and mid-sized Serbian enterprises. The instrument that was constructed for measuring KM contained 11 variables, categorized into 5 complex indicators: academic education, employee training, storage, dissemination and technical support. An online questionnaire with closed responses, interval and Likert scales was used for collecting the data. The survey was conducted on the sample of 157 enterprises in 15 Serbian cities, 60 of which were small and 34 mid-sized enterprises. The data were processed by the 'custom tables with column proportion of significance' statistical technique. Based on the results for small and mid-sized enterprises, measurement indicators such as employee training, dissemination and technical support show a positive level, while the 'storage' and 'academic education' indicator have a partial presence of KM stocks. When it comes to small enterprises, in terms of individual variables that are a constituent part of indicators, the largest stocks of KM were measured with the variable ’number of employees with bachelor’s degree’ where 98.3% of employees have a bachelor’s degree, as well as with the variable 'presence of intranets', within which 96.7% of enterprises are partially or fully associated with this medium. When it comes to mid-sized enterprises, viewed by individual variables, the largest stocks of KM are registered in the variables ’number of employees with bachelor’s degree' (100%) and 'frequency of attending educational seminars outside the enterprise (94%).