What is the motivation of an individual private company, dedicated to Aquaculture and / or Fishing, to invest resources and innovate its processes and / or products; in addition to taking advantage of the subsidies or tax incentives offered by the State? How does the value of a company that invest in innovation differ in the market from another that does not?
When the owner / s or the management of a small or medium for-profit private company, dedicated to Aquaculture and / or Fishing, embarks on a Technological Innovation project for its processes and / or products; it does so with the expectation of increasing the profitability of its business, in the short term. However, to achieve this return, it is not enough just to have a good innovative idea, resources to develop it, and incentives to reduce the economic and financial risk involved in putting it into practice.
Sometimes, very good Technological Innovation projects are not fully assimilated by the organization itself (Management and Workers) that initially promoted the change and a large part of the effort made and the resources invested, finally end up forgotten in filing cabinets or in prototypes stored in the warehouses of the companies. Therefore, to avoid such "failures", it is time to evaluate what went wrong and propose solutions to innovate, the current way of developing innovation, in small and medium-sized companies in the sector.
Dr. Martha Beatriz Peluffo A. and Ing. Edith Catalán, experts in "Knowledge Management"; propose in this regard (2008), that deconstructing what has been learned and rebuilding a new structure of knowledge is the most complex process in learning by people and organizations, when they have to incorporate new forms of work or methodologies developed by innovators. Therefore, it is concluded that the sustainable success in time of the application of a new innovative technology and the obtaining of its desired profitability, decisively involve the human aspect of the organization, subject of innovation.
Applying the aforementioned proposal in practice implies that the design and technological dimensioning of a new process line or a new product must be an interactive succession between the personal tacit knowledge that the individuals that make up the company have developed, during their experience over the years and the new explicit knowledge that will be generated during the research carried out in the development of the Technological Innovation project.
The contribution of the "Knowledge Management" to a Technological Innovation project consists basically in defining a priori, the cultural identity of the organization subject to the application of innovation, identifying the tacit "knowledge" it possesses and the way in which the It flows within the company to then build the appropriate strategies so that it generates and manages its own “knowledge” continuously. In this way, the application of "Knowledge Management" ensures the optimal relationship between the resources allocated to the Technological Innovation project and the results obtained from it, in terms of profitability.
Obviously, that the integration of the "Knowledge Management" in a Technological Innovation project necessarily implies allocating "extra" resources to finance its application. However, in the era of the Knowledge Economy, mentioned by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1999) in “The knowledge-creating organization”, in which it is proposed that Toffler and Peter Drucker define that “knowledge” is the fourth factor of production, in addition to land, labor and capital; In Chile, an accounting system that clearly establishes how to assign value to said intangible asset has not yet been defined.
According to the work published (2006) by Ms. Verónica Pizarro T, about the opinion of national accounting experts on the normative treatment of intangibles in Chile; Most of these professionals are of the opinion that in order to provide a solution to the information on intangible assets, the accounting standard should change and adapt to the new times, making more flexible and broadening the recognition, exposure and disclosure foundations of the referred intangible assets.
This current scenario generates suspicion on the part of the owner / s or the management of a small or medium-sized company, to allocate resources to the incorporation of the Knowledge Management, in the Technological Innovation project; since the investment is not reflected in their balance sheets as a concrete intangible asset, therefore they tend to invest directly only in a "new machine", which ultimately results in a trap for obtaining the expected profitability with the development of said project.
