Knowledge Management in Startups: Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Agenda

Piera Centobelli, Roberto Cerchione and Emilio Esposito
Additional contact information
Piera Centobelli: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Naples Federico II, P.le Tecchio 80, 80125 Naples, Italy
Roberto Cerchione: Department of Engineering, University of Naples Parthenope, Centro Direzionale di Napoli, Isola C4, 80143 Naples, Italy
Emilio Esposito: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Naples Federico II, P.le Tecchio 80, 80125 Naples, Italy

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 3, 1-19

Abstract: This paper conducts a systematic literature review on knowledge management (KM) in the context of startups in order to analyze the state of the art, identify research gaps and define a future research agenda. The main findings highlight that, even though there is an increasing number of papers on the topic of KM in startups, several issues are still neglected. Specifically, the paper identifies four main gaps in the body of literature. The first gap deals with the environmental and socio-political factors influencing the adoption of KM in startups. The second gap regards the lack of a comprehensive taxonomy of knowledge management systems (KMSs) that may support the processes of knowledge creation, acquisition, storage, transfer, sharing and application. This second gap allows us to identify a third gap concerning the level of alignment between startup’s strategies and technologies adopted. Finally, the fourth gap deals with the issue of the impact of KM on startup’s performances with regard to economic, financial, market, technical, technological, organizational, human and relational performance. From these four gaps, six research questions (RQs) have been proposed. These RQs allow us to identify possible areas of analysis to define a future research agenda. Neglecting these issues means underestimating all the possible advantages of KM adoption for a startup to achieve efficiency, effectiveness and scalability goals.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; factors affecting KM; KMSs; knowledge management; performance; start-up firms; scalability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/3/361/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/3/361/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:9:y:2017:i:3:p:361-:d:91821

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().