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

Existing tools that are used to support the process of transferring tacit knowledge into explicit . knowledge do not support the affection of individuals and their knowledge, but rather data and information processing. A more personalised view of knowledge is required, and a toolbox has been constructed in order to increase the individual's capacity to describe hisher own situation within organisations. This is assumed to motivate the person to contribute with knowledge. An empirical investigation of a prototypical nature has been conducted. The empirical results are positive for eliciting knowledge.

This article proposes a Knowledge Networking approach to the development of Workplace Health & Safety Knowledge in order to overcome the limits and obstacles associated with the more traditional linear model of Knowledge Transfer in organisations. The province of Québec has developed a Network approach to managing workplace health and safety that is highly regarded by health & safety practitioners and researchers throughout Canada. Its research arm, the Robert Sauvé Research Institute on Workplace Health & Safety (IRSST) also uses a Knowledge Network approach to guide its research agenda. The success of those network initiatives has led the Eastern Canada Research Consortium on Workplace Health & Safety to create a Knowledge Transfer Research Laboratory (KTLab) to support research on the transfer of WHS best practices develop in Québec and elsewhere to Atlantic Canada using a networking approach.

The aim of this paper is to discuss which factors can be seen essentially affecting a company's learning ability through its organizational receptivity in inter‑organizational knowledge transfer. This will be done by developing a typology of the factors affecting company's organizational receptivity (and absorptive capacity) of new knowledge in inter‑organizational knowledge transfer. Yet, only after the pre‑conditions for the cooperation are created, it is the individuals' abilities and the organizational culture that can essentially affect the outcome.

This paper describes a Process Framework for an Interoperable Semantic Enterprise Environment (PF‑ISEE) for conceptualising knowledge by coupling business process activities and the Knowledge Transfer Cycle. The PF‑ISEE is triggered by an activity and starts the Knowledge Transfer Cycle. The Knowledge Transfer Cycle provides six core concepts with methods, tools and templates to create, manipulate, store and retrieve information. Within the Knowledge Transfer Cycle, special methods are applied in the context of knowledge intensive business process activities with a rep‑ resentation model that can be a global, role depended or an application inherited concept representation. The paper in‑ troduces the main advantages and challenges of each core concept and explains its position in the Knowledge Transfer Cycle. Furthermore, it is shown how the PF‑ISEE can be part of an Enterprise Semantic Web in order to integrate se‑ mantic tools and technologies in standard enterprise applications.

Knowledge transfer is no longer reducible to classical solutions such as face‑to‑face training, technical education or tutoring. Knowledge to be transferred is professional knowledge (Business Knowledge). It involves the whole Knowledge Capital within an organization. Identifying the knowledge components that are worthwhile transferring is not an easy task. This is the problem addressed in this paper.

The purpose of this article is to analyze how knowledge creation within production process verification units within companies and knowledge transfer between product development and production units are affected by the use of virtual prototypes. The analysis shows that the use of virtual prototypes has a negative effect on knowledge creation and transfer. However, increased degrees of acceptance regarding the new method combined with improved technical level are anticipated to reduce these negative effects.