Advanced knowledge management concept for sustainable environmental integration

Between knowing sustainability challenges and sustainable acting is still a big difference. What can be done with Knowledge Management (KM) to improve this situation? The sustainable treatment of the resource knowledge includes social, environmental and organizational aspects like converting economic goals to knowledge goals, discharging obsolete knowledge, detecting knowledge gaps or offering automatic mechanisms for knowledge sharing and transfer. This paper illustrates the significance and functionality of KM for sustainable environmental integration from two aspects: maintaining structural knowledge and accessing and integrating external customer knowledge sources. The first aspect in regards to innovations or new markets is with direct impact on organizational knowledge. This produces knowledge gaps, which have to be filled by making available qualifiable operational performance indicators on the strategic layer as decision support component. The pragmatic approach behind this way of proceeding is the determination of decision goals for the initiatives, which leads to measurable alterations. The second aspect treats a new approach to evaluate and apply customer knowledge for the integration of product use information into product development. This is mandatory for the development and improvement of products and services covering the market demands.