ALIGNING KNOWLEDGE AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT

The Rijksvastgoedbedrijf (RVB) is the real estate organization of the Dutch government responsible for the development, management, and conservation of its real estate portfolio. In the coming years, it has to innovate to meet the climate, energy, and environmental targets set by the government. Innovation management is applied at the RVB to guide the innovation processes in the organization. Innovation is inevitably related to knowledge. In order to innovate knowledge is necessary and by innovating knowledge is created. Knowledge management is applied RVB wide to manage the knowledge present and created at the RVB. The aim of this study is twofold: to find out how the alignment between knowledge management and innovation management is currently produced at the RVB, and to give recommendations on how this alignment can be improved. There is limited literature on the alignment between the two types of management, this study contributes to the theory combining these concepts. Eleven in-depth interviews, document analysis, participant observation, and secondary data allowed the creation of a design of the current alignment of knowledge and innovation management. The results show that the current alignment is not sufficiently organized yet. One of the main bottlenecks in the alignment is indicated to be in the flow from knowledge, both tacit and explicit, to innovation projects. This is due to a lack of a centralized place where explicit knowledge is stored and a lack of an overview of who has tacit knowledge and where this is located within the organization. A second bottleneck is the lack of evaluation of the innovation projects which hampers the creation of knowledge from innovation. Based on literature and the empirical results multiple recommendations are given to improve the alignment. These include institutionalizing the evaluation of innovation projects, centralizing the storage of explicit knowledge, making the tacit knowledge infrastructure more visible, and putting both knowledge management and innovation management more on the map at the RVB.