Customer knowledge management and its role on continues innovation and superior performance (Case study of private banks in Guilan)

Abstract

With increasing fierce competition in recent years, many organizations pay attention to outside sources, especially customer knowledge, in order to achieve new source of competitive advantage. The main purpose of our paper is to shed light on the consequences of customer knowledge flows on various dimensions of innovation and organization performance. Investigating 280 employees of private banks in Guilan, and analyzing the data by LISREL, we found out that knowledge from customers, as an important source of new ideas and competitive advantage, has a positive impact on innovation speed and quality and also operational and financial performance. Also, our results demonstrate a different effect of knowledge about customer and knowledge for customer on various dimensions of innovation and firm performance. Our conclusions may help banks in formulating appropriate strategy in order to achieve higher innovation capability and superior performance by utilizing customer knowledge flows effectively.

Keywords

• customers’ knowledge flows
• Firm Performance
• Customer Knowledge Management
• innovation