Effective Factors on Knowledge Management (KM) Application in Guilan Province's Manufacturing Companies

Complicacy, variety and ever-increasing changes, assumed as outstandingly evident organizational environment features, impose a situation where inconsiderate attitude or carelessness could end in loss of competitiveness or even survival among rivals. Today, organizations have come to the point that nothing, but knowledge and innovation could make them desirably successful in a competitive world. Accordingly, this research pursues the goal of explaining how corporate performance is boosted through knowledge management and innovation in the manufacturing companies that enjoy research and development (R&D) units in Guilan province. Methodologically speaking, the paper is a descriptive-analytical research emphatically based on correlation. Research population includes all R&D units-owning manufacturing companies in Guilan, totaling 57 companies. The researchers used simple probability sampling for collecting data to select 39 companies out of whole. A questionnaire was designed to collect the related data whose validity and reliability were tested. Descriptive-inferential statistics was employed by the help of SPSS-19 and Visual PLS- 1.04 applications in order to analyze the data. The findings showed through path analysis that there were meaningful relations between knowledge management capability and innovation value of speed from one side, and between innovation value of speed and company’s performance.