COMPARATIVE STUDY ON KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT DIMENSIONS THAT SUPPORT EDUCATION AND NEW LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES IN ROMANIAN UNIVERSITIES

In the last years, globalization and competitiveness have increased organizations' concern on innovative ways of their operations development. Innovation has expended from an internal approach to an open one. Many government policies have encouraged greater collaboration between the three worlds that were once very separate: the private and public research, business and/or industrial partners (as a structure for wealth creation) and education. All three, can cover virtuous circles to produce successful innovation. In this context, universities have extend their traditional roles or primary functions of education and research, to new one; entrepreneurship university or the knowledge based university are new approaches that give a new meaning and content to the traditional education role. Having these ideas as background, the paper presents the results of a theoretical and experimental research done with the support of four public high education institutions in Romania. The research aims to identify and compare the most important dimensions of knowledge management in the case of engineering education, in order to discover ways and improvement methods for implementing new learning technologies (more attractive, more efficient and effective). In addition, the research results will affect (support through the improvement measures formulation and implementation) not only the education process, but also research activities and universities third mission named the transfer of knowledge to the private and community sector (active engagement of universities in regional economic development).