Abstract

Corporate governance plays a very important role in a corporation since it ensures outstanding performance and sustainability. Corporate governance is mainly influenced by the people within the organisation, its structure, and its accumulated experiences from the environment, whether it is internal or external (Musa et al. 2008). Unfortunately, managers come and go, even as the corporation itself tries to preserve its existence. As managers leave, they take with them their experience or tacit knowledge, and this situation may affect the corporation’s performance. Once an experience manager leaves it will take time for a newly appointed person to get up to speed in understanding the policies and responsibilities that is required of him or her by the corporation. Hence, it is pertinent for a corporation to create an environment that facilitates knowledge transfer. This is where knowledge management comes into the picture. Knowledge Management programs are typically tied to organisational objectives and are intended to lead to the achievement of specific outcomes, such as shared intelligence, improved performance, and competitive advantage (Alavi and Leidner 2001). However, just having a program implemented is not enough. Together with knowledge management programs, corporations need to have an innovative culture that encourages the sharing of knowledge and facilitate the reflection of new information and ideas. Normally, when we talk about innovation, it is always about creating new inventions, services and processes in order to improve the current quality of life. Yet, before all of that could happen, the environment within the corporation and its people, must be prepared to innovate. This means they must be willing to share information so that explicit knowledge can be transformed into tacit knowledge easily, thus enabling a new manager to understand a codified information faster and allow efficiency to continue. Knowledge management programs can be considered as the corporation’s formal effort to facilitate sharing of knowledge, while an innovative culture within the corporation can be looked at as an informal effort by individuals within the corporation to share their knowledge, expertise and, continuously expand their capabilities. It must be imbedded within the corporation so that it becomes second nature to it without having to be constantly reminded. Innovation is the new buzzword in corporations today. In order to survive in a rapidly changing business environment, corporations are forced to become innovative.