The Impacts of Knowledge Management Practices on Innovation Activities in High- and Low-Tech Firms

This paper presents an empirical study on how knowledge management practices and innovation sources affect product innovation performance, among the 152 manufacturers in the low- and high- tech industries in China. The results indicate that external innovation sources are positively correlated with innovation activities and new product performance. Intellectual Property (IP) and knowledge management practices (KMP) are positively correlated with innovation activities, and KMP is positively correlated with innovation sources. The dual effect of KMP shows its indispensable effect on the new product development for both high-tech and low-tech firms, but for low-tech firms, such effect is relatively weak. This empirical study shows that IP management is critical to high-tech but not low-tech firms. We also found that, for innovation activities, low-tech depends on the external sources of innovation whilst high-tech firms do not.