Building innovation capability: Bangladesh case study

One of businesses' biggest challenges is to maintain continuous flow of innovation to ensure pre-emptive and sustainable competitive advantage. Firms are periodically introducing new and modified products but in some cases, total customer satisfaction is not fully achieved. The firms argue that they are relentlessly offering new products but the consumers are not always buying them. On the consumers' side, complaint is that most of the available products are 'me, too' products with very little basic difference and the choices available are also not always to their preference. In this context, organizations are under tremendous pressure for survival. In Bangladesh, a few firms are doing an efficient job of survival. They are tackling the challenges from home and abroad successfully. Their performance record in the recent years has been quite impressive. Some of these organizations are moving towards the international arena, especially, in the South-Asian market. While studying their success stories, a very interesting fact has come to light - some of these firms are using knowledge in their innovation process. The concept of knowledge management is a relatively a new one and its application, particularly in the developing countries like Bangladesh, is quite exceptional. This has provided an opportunity to study these companies and their knowledge strategies in the context of Bangladesh. The main purpose of this study is to illustrate and analyse the knowledge management strategy in Bangladeshi firms with the help of two cases. This study will demonstrate how both the companies shifted from their traditional way of management to the knowledge management.