Knowledge has become the most important strategic factor in corporate operations
(Spender, 1996), as it is associated with firms’ capabilities to achieve a competitive
advantage (Teece, 2001). Accordingly, companies have to find ways to adequately manage
this aspect, which poses a particular challenge for smaller firms as they usually lack the
resources needed to make full usage of their knowledge stock. Knowledge management
has been studied extensively. However, there is a tendency to focus on large businesses
and neglect SMEs. Against the background of SMEs’ significance to many countries, this
situation can be assessed as unsatisfactory. Previous studies have shown that in many
SMEs there is an absence of systematic knowledge management (McAdam and Reid, 2001;
Wong and Aspinwall, 2005) and if measures are implemented, they may be regarded as less
sophisticated. However, this does not mean that suitable approaches to tackle knowledge
management problems are less significant to SME success. Rather it may be argued that a
suitable handling of knowledge is a particularly important factor as to whether a firm survives
or not.