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This paper aims to explore how professional competences are defined and assessed by clients of professional service firms (PSFs). Extant research has studied the knowledge base of professionals, but limited research has been conducted to develop an understanding of how clients value this knowledge.

The study is based on in-depth qualitative research design, which is suitable for inductive theory building. The collected data consist of interviews with 80 clients and sellers of professional services.

The authors offer a framework detailing the interrelationships between knowledge, experience and references as assessed by clients. In particular, references are used to evaluate experience, which in turn function as a proxy for how clients assess knowledge. Also, the study shows how the clients’ assessment of professional knowledge assets involves multiple levels and factors.

Limited research has been conducted to understand client preferences and PSF competitive advantage from a client perspective. This paper contributes to extant literature on knowledge management by integrating it with insights from recent developments within service marketing focusing on client centricity and the role of clients in value creation. This perspective complements and extends what is already known about knowledge management.

The paper suggests that while it is essential to manage knowledge as such, references and experience has a very central role in selling and commercializing knowledge-intensive services. Thus, to the degree that clients buy knowledge, sellers should think carefully about how experience and references are developed, captured and conveyed to clients. From a client point, the identified framework has value in offering a client-centric conceptualization of knowledge that can be used as a starting point in defining their knowledge needs and in structuring and professionalizing their purchasing efforts related to professional services.

Knowledge-intensive service organizations sell their knowledge and resources to clients directly as experts and indirectly through their services. It is therefore imperative for these organizations to understand how their knowledge is evaluated by buyers. The paper takes a unique client-centric perspective in understanding knowledge from a buyer’s point of view and as perceived by the buyer, which largely has been lacking in existing knowledge management research.

To guarantee alignment between ongoing activities and organizational goals, innovation management theory emphasizes management control and explicit innovation strategies as prerequisites for innovation performance. However, the theory on open services innovation emphasizes individual autonomy and incentives to foster open innovations. The aim of this paper is to explore this inconsistency.

An explorative research design involving 25 semi-structured interviews in five large scale-intensive service firms is explored. Scale-intensive service firms are strategically sampled for this study since these firms experience tension between open service innovation characteristics and efforts to standardize.

The authors show how individual autonomy facilitates the internal and external networking required in open innovations. However, individualized incentives do not suffice to motivate, mobilize and direct the collaboration and collective effort needed to ensure successful implementation of open innovation processes. Innovation performance is a collective effort, and the findings suggest that firms' business strategy works as a collective incentive system.

The findings imply that firms should not rely on individualized incentives alone to implement open innovation processes successfully. The implementation of more collectively oriented incentives is also necessary to motivate the collective effort required to succeed with open innovation.

The study extends previous work and shows how innovation practices are collective efforts that also involve the mobilization of external resources. The incentives observed have an effect on individual behaviour, while performance measures, to a larger degree, cater to the collective level. The authors present three propositions for further empirical investigation.

This empirical paper aims to assess how social media can foster workplace learning within a globally dispersed project environment. In general, there are few studies on the use of social media in organizations, and many of these emphasize on issues related to knowledge transfer. Although learning traditionally has been as acquisition of knowledge, increasingly researchers point to learning-as-participation occurring through work collaboration. Social media promise increased opportunities for communication and collaboration, extending the context of collaboration beyond the local setting. However, there exists limited research on how social media can foster workplace learning, for example, between globally dispersed colleagues.

The study is based on an exploratory, in-depth single case study of an international professional service firm’s implementation of an internal wiki system to address the research question: how are social media utilized in an organization to foster workplace learning among its dispersed individual experts? Data are gathered in 35 semi-structured interviews, as well as documents studies and observations. Data are coded and analyzed utilizing the context and learning factors of workplace learning.

The paper shows how the wiki system enables hybrid knowledge management strategies linked to virtual collaboration on daily project tasks, involving documentation, search, interaction and knowledge exchange, as well as socialization and learning from practice among dispersed groups and individuals. The learning mechanisms involved in virtual collaboration do not differ much from what is reported on face-to-face workplace learning, however, the context factors are extended beyond the local setting.

The findings identify four determinants for using the wiki that can be of use to other organizations implementing similar virtual collaboration technology. First, the wiki must directly relate to the daily work by offering interactive and updated information concerning current project challenges. Second, the system must enable transparency in the daily project work to allow search. Third, the intention with the search is of lesser degree to identify encyclopedic information than it is to visualize individual competence. Fourth, the quality assurance of the data posted at the wiki is important.

The study reveals how an international knowledge-based organization can utilize social media to leverage knowledge and experiences from multiple geographically dispersed projects by enabling virtual collaboration. Extant empirical research on workplace learning emphasizes on face-to-face interactions in groups, for example, when engineers, or accountants, in teams interact and collaborate at client premises. However, there exists limited knowledge concerning how workplace learning can be achieved through virtual collaboration.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of how practices creating knowing can be enabled in project work.

The study is based on an exploratory, in‐depth case study of an international professional service firm (IPSF) and local and transnational project work to deliver services. Project work is investigated through a practice approach.

In transnational project work, three knowing practices are identified – networking, doing, and sorting – and three practices of creating new knowing – finding, learning, and probing.

Although only one organization was studied, the research presented shows that knowledge creation and project work benefit from a practice perspective to highlight the enacted aspects of knowing and new knowing.

The findings show that different project phases enable the necessary knowing and/or new knowing practices through a differentiated focus on social interaction and contacts on the one hand and the use of materials, documents, systems and infrastructure on the other.

The paper extends earlier research and shows that practices of knowing involve more than doing and practices of creating knowing involve more than learning. A conceptual understanding of knowing‐who, knowing‐how, and knowing‐what is developed to identify the knowing and new knowing while appreciating their interrelations. Further, the paper shows how the project phases and the practices can be better enabled through a differentiated focus on the social and the material use.