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The ability to create knowledge and diffuse it throughout an organization is today recognized as a major strategic capability for gaining competitive advantage. Scholars and managers have shown an increasing interest in understanding and managing organizational knowledge. Despite this, there are few examples in the literature that bridge the gap between knowledge and knowledge application. This article develops a knowledge management initiative which facilitates knowledge creation and sharing beyond project boundaries, based on exploratory research at pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. The results indicate that, by allowing the emergence of knowledge facilitators, practical knowledge for action is produced and shared. The article explores the dynamic and relational nature of knowledge when managing knowledge, it then develops actionable tools for lateral knowledge creation and knowledge transfer, and concludes with implications for managers using the tools.

This article explores the use of organizational learning mechanisms to create actionable knowledge in a pharmaceutical company. An action research based approach was used to explore the nature and issues associated with fostering the dynamic learning capability within the firm. The results indicate that dynamic learning capability is embedded and influenced by company culture, existing skills and competence, organizational structure, incentives for learning, capacity for continuous change and leadership. It is argued that enabling actionable knowledge creation is a fragile process that has to be managed with care, and is far more complex than the literature suggests.

This study aims to shed lights on the dynamics of involving and sharing knowledge with stakeholders in the process of new service development (NSD) over time.

The paper is based on a paradigmatic case focused on the development of the digital MBA program by the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano. Primary and secondary data have been largely collected and analyzed, involving multiple stakeholders of the development process.

This study describes how several stakeholders have been involved during the phase of the NSD process, showing two variables that ruled their involvement: the level of control exerted by the School on the stakeholders and the level of flexibility of the stakeholders.

This research offers insights to the understanding of the dynamics of involving and sharing knowledge with multiple-stakeholders in NSD. From a theoretical perspective, it contributes to stakeholder theory linking it with the service management literature, highlighting the role of cyclical fluctuations in the involvement activities.

This research offers insights to managers dealing with the development of new services, offering them a novel view on how various stakeholders may be involved over time, in different moment and in different ways, to properly enhance the development process thanks to their knowledge sharing.

This paper contributes to the service management literature emphasizing the role of multiple stakeholders while providing insights and suggestions to manage the complex relationships created by their involvement and their knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to address the fundamental question “can insider action research approach trigger and enhance simultaneously executive development and company performance”. To answer this question the framework of first, second and third person practice is useful in capturing the range of experiences and challenges that the executives face as they work to lead change in their organizations. Insider action research is an approach that facilitates executive development, creates new knowledge and develops change leadership competencies.

Insider action research.

Insider action research offers a value-added approach to management development and executive education programmes. It extends the acquisition of basic business disciplinary knowledge to the development of the competency (knowledge and skills) to design, facilitate and lead change by the rigours of the action research process and through a focus on first, second and third person practice.

Action research is particular and generates actionable knowledge in localized settings. Further cases in how executives engage in insider action research as they lead change in their organizations are needed to extend this underdeveloped approach.

Yet, despite wide spread executive educational programmes and the rhetoric about the need to make executive education more relevant to organizational needs, an astonishing number of business leaders claim that executive programmes and executive degrees fail in addressing the emerging needs of business leaders. Insider action research provides a radically different executive education orientation.

Insider action research is an approach that facilitates executive development, creates new knowledge and develops change leadership capabilities.

Health care organizations are increasingly demanded to balance the institutional logic of “medical professionalism” and “business-like health care,” that is, to both recognize physicians’ professional expertise while locating it in a wider social, economic, and political organizational setting. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications from this shift in terms of leadership work in health care organizations.

Case study methodology including interviews with 15 residents in Swedish health care organizations.

A study of the willingness of residents to take on leadership positions show that leadership roles are treated as what is potentially hindering the acquisition of the know-how, skills, and expertise demanded to excel in the clinical work. Consequently, taking on leadership positions in the future was relatively unattractive for the residents. In order to overcome such perceived conflict between professional skill development and leadership roles, top management of health care organizations must help residents overcome such beliefs, or other professional groups may increasingly populate leadership positions, a scenario not fully endorsed by the community of physicians.

The paper demonstrates how complementary or completing institutional logics are influencing debates and identities on the “shop floors” of organizations.

As one advertising slogan keeps reminding us – it’s good to talk. This is also true in the workplace where effective communication is essential if knowledge and information is to be exploited to the full. And an organization that boasts a knowledgeable workforce can gain considerable competitive advantage over its rivals. Roth details how pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has utilized a knowledge management initiative to enhance the creation of knowledge, and to establish and improve relations between the different factions of its organization.

The purpose of this paper is to present a cost‐benefit interpretation of academic‐practitioner research by describing and analysing several recent relevant examples of academic‐practitioner research with a focus on doctoral theses carried out at universities and business schools in clusters of research centred in North America, Australia and Europe.

Using case study examples, a value proposition framework for undertaking collaborative research for higher degree level study is developed and presented.

Value proposition benefits from this level of collaborative research can be summarised as enhancing competencies at the individual and organisational level as well as providing participating universities with high‐quality candidates/students and opportunities for industry engagement. The project management (PM) professional bodies can also extend PM knowledge but they need to be prepared to provide active support.

A model for better defining the value proposition of collaborative research from a range of stakeholder perspectives is offered that can be adapted for researchers and industry research sponsors.

Few papers offer a value proposition framework for explaining collaborative research benefits. This paper addresses that need.

The purpose of the paper is to report a study of knowledge sharing practices in the clinical research organization in a major pharmaceutical company. While knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer is often conceived of in terms of codification and storage in databases accessed through information technology, there is less experience in industry from working with knowledge sharing in face‐to‐face communication settings.

A collaborative research methodology including academic researchers, consultants and company representatives was used to examine and develop a knowledge‐sharing model. Interview and participative observations were used as data collection methods.

The study suggests that the use of so‐called knowledge facilitators, organizing and leading knowledge sharing seminars among clinical research teams, needs to develop the capacity to interrelate heedfully, that is, the dispositions to act with attentiveness, alertness, and care, to fully explore the insights, experiences, and know‐how generated in the clinical research teams. Heed precedes successful sharing of knowledge.

It is concluded that the literature on knowledge sharing needs to pay closer attention to the practices on the micro level in knowledge sharing, in the day‐to‐day collaborations between different professional groups.

The paper applies the concept of “heedful interrelation” in a practical knowledge management project in a major pharmaceutical company.

Engineering work is a specific form of sociomaterial practice, drawing on and combining social and material resources to accomplish desirable effects, often combining technological and social resources. A study of an electrical engineering development project suggests that the work unfolds as a process whereby technological artefacts are verified on the basis of testing procedures and whereby events concerning technological failure, what has been called the “back‐talk” of technology, are handled using joint problem‐solving. The purpose of this paper is to report on a study of a new product development project at a multinational telecommunications company.

An ethnographic case study of a new product development project at a major multinational telecommunications company was undertaken.

Engineering work is based on distributed know‐how and joint collaborations, emerging as a patchwork of activities where one single person may know a lot, but not everything, about the technology‐in‐the‐making. The paper concludes that joint concern for the technology, manifested as its gradual advancement, is what serves as the glue holding the community of engineers together.

The paper presents an original study of the work of a team of electrical engineers and inquires into how engineers combine technical and social resources when attempting to make the technology work.

Identities are central to the regulation and control of knowledge‐intensive work. Rather than being managed on the basis of technocratic or bureaucratic control, knowledge intensive firms are employing knowledge workers who enact and internalize identities and roles that guide everyday behaviour in organizations. However, the concept of identity is relational and contingent on local conditions and interactions in everyday practices, different identities may be complementary or even contradictory. The paper aims to show that consultants are altering between being experts and speaking‐partners, two identities that in many ways are complementary but also mutually reinforcing.

This is a case study of a Swedish management consulting firm, Johnson Consulting.

The challenge for consultants is to be capable of effortlessly transgressing the line of demarcation between the two identities – expert and speaking‐partner – and their accompanying practices for the benefit of the client. Skilled consultants are trained at moving back and forth between these positions while less experienced consultants may find it intimidating to lose their position as expert.

The paper concludes that knowledge‐intensive firms such as management consulting firms should articulate and elaborate on the various identities mobilized in everyday work when encountering clients.

The paper uses the literature on identities in knowledge‐intensive firms and an empirical study of management consultants to show that knowledge‐intensive work is always operating on the level of identities and self‐images. Understanding knowledge intensive firms thus demands an understanding of how co‐workers perceive their own role.