Valtech is a Paris‑based consulting firm established in 1993 and devoted to e‑business technologies. The company was initially structured as a distributor of new information technologies to the French and European market, which secondarily provided training in the use of its products. Valtech now positions itself as a pure knowledge‑transfer firm that instructs clients in the strategic use and development of cutting‑edge electronic technologies. Valtech organized itself according to KM principles in 1993, but only became aware of KM as a formal organizing framework in 1998. While the adoption of KM is often "pushed" onto companies by the academic or consulting communities, Valtech pulled itself toward KM organizing logics by the New Age of business it defined for itself. It is in this way an excellent example of strategic commitment and organizational design from a KM perspective. It is also relatively unique in that most of the literature records KM adoption from a "push" rather than a "pull" perspective.

This paper looks into the consultancy processes and professional practices of management consultants and of technology consultants from a knowledge management perspective. The process of consultancy in both cases was characterised by the following categories drawn from the analysis of interviews: boundaries, actors, process and information. The findings for each type of consultancy were synthesized into two different narratives. Considerable differences in the way they operate were identified in terms of: the definition of the context of the problem and risk assessment; negotiation through the client system and the use of language and vocabulary in the consultancy process, leading to the development of different professional discourses and different approaches to the facilitation of organisational learning

There are aspects of New Product Development (NPD) business processes that pose particularly difficult challenges to Organizational Learning systems. Short product and process life cycles compress the available time window for recouping the expenses associated with product development. Cross‑functional collaboration in product development organizations requires the merging of knowledge from diverse disciplinary and personal skills‑based perspectives. Cross‑institutional collaboration leads a requirement for knowledge to be combined from participants across multiple collaborating organizations. Transient existence in teams and high turnover results in a reduction in organizational knowledge unless there is a repository for knowledge rather than a dependence on knowledge which is situated in the minds of individuals. High rates of change in turbulent industries, such as electronics, motivates participants in NPD processes to effectively overcome these Organizational Learning challenges. The potential payoff includes time saved by not repeating mistakes and reuse of knowledge that leads to successful products and processes. IS research has paid little attention to NPD processes despite the fact that some IS appears to have the potential to have an impact in that area. Recent research completed by these researchers in Analog Devices Inc identified Organizational Learning challenges encountered by engineering teams in product development. This paper will report on these challenges and will describe how systems were developed to support organizational learning to support the product development process.

This paper addresses knowledge management assumptions and development visions in the following types of organisations: organic product‑focused and organic service‑focused organisations, mechanistic bureaucratic and mechanistic product‑focused organisations that represent different models of value creation. These types of organisations are identified and examined in relation to the changing knowledge management context of the transition economy in Estonia. Knowledge management priorities assessed by representatives of 95 organisations are then discussed in the qualitative research and learning framework.

This paper describes three building blocks of a technological Knowledge Management (KM) system that provides all relevant and practical means of supporting KM and thus differentiates itself from existing KM tools in goal and approach, as they usually deal with a limited range only. The three blocks described within this paper are: a virtual information pool, which utilizes Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), a single and central user interface providing ubiquitous access, and mechanisms to enrich the available data, essentially based on Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining techniques.

Practice based studies have provided rich descriptions of knowledge dynamics. On the other hand, they led to conceptualizations that question the possibility to view knowledge as a resource that can be oriented and shaped by managers. From this perspective, questions such as why an existing community has developed, or how to enable the emergence of a new community, are still unanswered. Such weaknesses are rooted in a tendency to ignore the cognitive motivations (theories) that lead actors to behave in a particular way. As a consequence, we propose that social practice can be explained as the outcome of interlocking cognitive theories and, moreover, that to shape practice, we need to act on theories.

In the case of events such as fundamental regulatory reforms or radical technological advances, firms have to undertake discontinuous or dynamic learning. Such learning involves the generation of new capacity through the acquisition of new knowledge and the combination of it with the firm's existing accumulated knowledge. In developing countries the challenge for firms to develop new competencies through dynamic learning is more complex due to political and economic complexities. This paper discusses the limitations of existing frameworks for analysing the process aspect of transformation and proposes a theoretical framework with which to explore dynamic learning in firms from developing countries. The proposed theoretical framework is based on a constructivist approach to organisational knowledge and uses the concept of absorptive capacity. The responses of large pharmaceutical firms to biotechnological change are used to illustrate the areas under investigation. The theoretical framework is used to explore the responses of Indian pharmaceutical firms to changes in patent law required by that country's accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The cases show that the theoretical framework is comprehensive and useful for exploring firm level knowledge processes within firms from developing countries. However a broader analysis of firm‑level learning in developing countries should include an analysis of the institutional environment as this plays an important role in creating environment for firm based learning.

Following the biological behaviour of a tree and its growth system, this paper proposes a model of valuation of the Intellectual Capital of an organization based on a variation of the classical Lotka‑Volterra equations system. The proposed model explains the growth of an organization as a consequence of its Intellectual Capital (increment of the surface of the roots), its Knowledge (the consumption of nutritious) and its Learning (fertility of the floor). And based on the proposed model, an example with real data is given.