Understanding the Role of Knowledge Management in Higher Education Partnerships Through Experts

This paper presents a Knowledge Management (KM) conceptual model that seeks to guide and facilitate the composition of partnerships in the Higher Education (HE) sector. Although the KM field includes a wide range of topics this article seeks to extract KM literature related to organisational studies and synthesise its understanding by evaluating a conceptual model developed in the context of HE partnerships. The model aims to provide insights on collaborative projects and treats educational institutions as living organisms that need to communicate, grow and change in order to best benefit from the available knowledge found at an individual and institutional level. Ontologically this research is based on a subjective approach thus leading towards an interpretivistic epistemological perspective which makes use of a qualitative approach seeking to elicit knowledge and expertise from individuals who have extensive first-hand experience in managing educational partnerships. This research used an expert panel composed of eight academics and practitioners working for UK HE institutions where the researcher discussed the relevance, robustness and applicability of the conceptual model in the context of HE partnerships. Afterwards, the researcher presented a list of five questions which were deemed important for further discussion with panellists (see appendix 1) in order to further improve the development of the conceptual model. The expert panel was concluded with two group activities between panellists to further extract relevant knowledge and expertise from the panellists. The findings of this research indicate that KM has a positive impact on the development of HE partnerships and highlighted that strengthening the support for KM behavioural constructs (the roots of the tree) is essential. Findings infer that conceptual model should reflect the potential partnership outcomes related to performance and/or growth presented as the fruits of the KM Partnership Tree.