The Role of Knowledge Management in Enhancing Knowledge Pull in the Construction Organisations to Deliver Innovation: A Case Study

Knowledge pull has become an essential requirement for construction organizations to survive in this knowledge era. As more and more industries are becoming knowledge based recognizing knowledge as a vital sustainable asset, construction industry cannot afford to lag behind for long. This paper argues that implementing knowledge management principles in the organisation would generate forces with in the organisation enabling the pull of knowledge from outside the organisation to within and exploit it to deliver innovation. This would pave the way for external sources of knowledge and innovation like universities or research centres to work closely with the industry and would ensure that useful and beneficial academic research would not go unnoticed. The paper provides an account of the event where a certain construction organisation has benefited by the effort of its employee who constantly strived to establish a link with the external innovative knowledge by attending research conferences and brought external knowledge of a certain innovative product within the organisation and used it on a construction project to deliver amazing innovation leading to profitability. Soft System Methodology (SSM) has been used to deliver this case study and to develop deeper understanding of the issues involved. The paper argues that such links with the external research and knowledge bodies should be regulated and knowledge management provides the organisation with such an interface