  In the global competition, companies are propelled by an immense pressure to
innovate. The trend to produce more new knowledge-intensive products or
services and the rapid progress of information technologies arouse huge
interest on knowledge management for innovation. However the strategy of
knowledge management is not widely adopted for innovation in industries due to
a lack of an effective approach of their integration. This study aims to help
the designers to innovate more efficiently based on an integrated approach of
knowledge management. Based on this integrated approach, a prototype of
distributed knowledge management system for innovation is developed. An
industrial application is presented and its initial results indicate the
applicability of the approach and the prototype in practice.
