Innovative technologies and knowledge management in the context of ownership

Abstract

Industry 4.0 brings critical challenges, radical changes and new requirements that are important for the survival of organisations. Digitalisation is also a cultural and organisational transformation of an organisation, encompassing all sectors of society and industry through the intelligent integration of digital technologies, processes, and capabilities at all levels and functions, completely changing the way business is conducted and the way value is created and delivered to stakeholders. There is a growing focus on the critical importance of integrating and embodying human factors in the digital workplace. The study aims to illustrate the relationship between knowledge management and emerging technologies. The paper seeks to answer the question of what differences in this relationship can be identified in terms of company ownership.

Each of the industrial revolutions required people to develop certain skills and competences in order to remain relevant in the work environment. The first revolution brought mechanisation, the second industrial revolution was already about cognitive skills. Industry 4.0 is now about digital skills. The skills required have evolved from physical to digital over the last few centuries. Organisations need to upskill their workforces with digital skills to achieve organisational goals if they are to reap the benefits of investing in digital technologies. Considering the increasing dependence of people on information, digital skills should be seen as a vital resource in today's society.

The primary data source for the survey was an online questionnaire, which was completed in 2022 via the Lime Survey platform. The sample of the survey consisted of managers of companies operating in Hungary. The survey yielded 5207 evaluable responses. Univariate and multivariate statistical methods were used to test the hypotheses. Descriptive statistics is the primary situational representation of the sample, while a multivariate regression model was used to answer the research question.

The results show that knowledge management projects appear to be an influential factor alongside technology intensity and significantly influence the use of innovative technologies, the extent of which is related to financial performance. In the context of technology use and human factors, there appear to be several barriers to efficiency, the primary one being the lack of digital competences in the workforce. Foreign ownership positively influences all of these. The future direction of the research is, on the one hand, to conduct a qualitative survey (semi-structured interviews), which will provide an opportunity to validate the large sample of quantitative data. On the other hand, looking at spatial differences, national cultures and culture clusters, since as the results show, it is the company's operational processes that tend to determine the use of innovative technology in the international arena, and this may depend to a large extent on the national culture of the parent company.