In today's information era, Knowledge Management (KM) continues to play an emerging role within business and management. It is diverse in nature and covers the systematic management of knowledge, of all kinds, within all levels and types of organizations. Research, so far, has concentrated on larger organizations where implementation resources are more or less readily available. There are very few studies that analyse the effects of organizational size on the key factors of KM. Research indicates that KM can be applied to small organizations, where there is no lack of resources and skills. However, while many knowledge-based issues are applicable to all organizations, the way in which they are tackled differs, depending on the organization size. Knowledge management is not a one-size-fit-all program and is best suited when individual programs are tailored to the need of the individual users. Beyond this, the initiative of KM should also fit into the organization culture.

We have been maintaining and passing knowledge from generation to generation for a better understanding of the past and the future. In a nutshell, KM includes four knowledge methods: knowledge creation, knowledge storage, knowledge distribution, and knowledge application. Apart from the above, top management plays a key role in KM and provides vision and energy for the organization's efforts in managing its knowledge assets. The knowledge sharing practice starts at the top. For instance, in companies like Toyota and General Electric, the leadership process is all about sharing knowledge and creating knowledge. Their experience with KM reveals that KM plays an important role in gaining and sustaining their competitive advantage in global market. Toyota is gaining immensely after initiating its crucial knowledge program for practicing Kaizen (continuous improvement). Through Kaizen practice, people working in different subsidiaries of Toyota are consistently producing high quality cars.

In many cases, organizational culture has been increasingly recognized as a major barrier to KM. Studies on this issue share the importance of organizational culture, which influences the effects of other factors like technology, management practices on the success of knowledge management. For successful KM initiatives, organizations have to create an environment where people feel comfortable and are willing to share their knowledge. Thomas H Davenport, author of Working Knowledge warns that, "a knowledge oriented culture challenges people to share knowledge throughout the organization". To overcome this challenge, Davenport suggests that, organizations have to exhibit the benefits of knowledge management, and knowledge-sharing practices should be rewarded with tangibles like financial rewards and intangibles like recognition incentives. Organizational structure should also facilitate the knowledge sharing and cross-boundary collaboration. Experience reveals that organizations with flexible and organic structure are more likely to achieve the perceived benefits of KM than those which are rigid and bureaucratic. According to Davenport, organizations with a rigid structure must be prepared to re-engineer its organizational structure to facilitate KM.

Against this background, the paper, "Does Organization Size Matter for Starting Knowledge Management Program?", by Parag Sanghani, tries to empirically prove the relationship between starting of KM program and organization size. The research results suggest that there is no significant association between organizational size and knowledge management awareness. However, big organizations are more structured and organized and their size forces them to look towards KM systems for managing their organizational knowledge, whereas small scale organizations are lagging behind in starting KM program, which may be because of the scale of investment and return from KM initiatives.

As a social science, economics has always considered sets of individuals with assumed characteristics, namely the level of knowledge, although in an implicit way in most of the cases. The paper, "What Does Economics Assume About People's Knowledge?", by Antonio Caleiro, explores the characteristics, e.g., knowledge of the individuals, who may interact in sub-sets of society. It highlights recent developments in the economics of knowledge, i.e., the so-called learning models, which have been considered as more realistic approaches to model the process by which individuals acquire knowledge.

The next paper, "Interfirm Knowledge Transfer Methods", by Frederic Prevot, shows how multinational companies transfer knowledge to their local suppliers. For this purpose, it identifies four methods that include moderate method, rational method, technical method and the complete method. The authors identify these four knowledge transfer methods, based on the experience of the American multinationals and their relationships with local suppliers in Brazil. The concluding paper, "How to be More Efficient in Managing Intellectual Capital: An Overview of Various Techniques", by Gyorgy Boda, Judit Lorincz and Peter Szlavik outlines the growing importance of intellectual capital as the most significant production factor and the related tendencies, which have a significant effect on management.

- N Janardhan Rao
Consulting Editor