For many years the knowledge in an organization has been very well treated and protected, by a discipline widely known as Knowledge Management (KM).
Despite it can be consider one of the main pillars of any automotive research and development (R&D) department, several companies do not pay attention to it as they should.
Who does manage and apply it appropriately certainly has been granted with innumerous business opportunities, maximizing the usage of its resources, reducing development and validation time consumption and minimizing the inherent risks of new projects.
This paper covers pure KM concepts and presents several tools and practices that have been proven very good and effective for knowledge identification, storage and usage by R&D departments.