Evaluating the competitiveness of knowledge resources

Abstract: For companies to be successful in today’s economy, they need to be able to identify and sustain the value of their knowledge base in order to nurture, exploit and guard it (Duane &Hitt, 2005) (Goel, et al., 2010). Knowledge Evaluation is the gathering name for assessing knowledge assets or clusters. There are several models for valuing knowledge components provided in literature, some of which have been used and reviewed by researchers at Technische Universität München where this thesis work was performed, see (Schmidt, et al.,2013) (Schmidt, et al., 2014). However, an assessment tool for the reviewing competitiveness of knowledge assets was sought. Therefore, the main purpose of this thesis was to investigate the possibility, and usefulness, of evaluating the competitiveness of knowledge assets. This followed by reviewing if such an evaluation could be a beneficial tool in ProductDevelopment (PD) processes.In implementing this thesis work a literature review was used to find the sought evaluation.Following, the found valuation models were reviewed, and then their best aspects were chosen and built into a new model. This model was then implemented at a company. This implementation with some articles for literature support was used to answer if the model could be beneficial in product development processes. Results say that it is possible to perform an evaluation of the competitiveness of knowledge. The proposed model here was thought useful in providing a gap analysis. It could be especially useful in PD processes, as they are knowledge intensive activities, and thus, require a full understanding of the knowledge base.