European Journal of Service Management

Nowadays, the concept of competitiveness refers not only to the development of material resources and their impact on the economic expansion of individual economic units or larger structures such as regions. In the literature, it is assumed that the current success of the socio-economic development depends primarily on intangible factors such as knowledge and innovation. These resources are determined by the value of human capital, therefore much attention is devoted to its proper development. It is claimed that the quality of this capital determined by the level of employees’ knowledge, influences the expansion and development of both successful enterprises and those in a difficult market situation. Therefore, the main focus of this article is to determine the sources of information and knowledge used in the process of managing knowledge in companies and to identify the level of the awareness of entrepreneurs on the benefits that properly used knowledge brings to the organizations. In order to achieve the assumed goal, focus studies were conducted among the employees of enterprises from the SMEs sector located in the West Pomeranian Voivodship.