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.

In today's competitive arena, knowledge and intellectual assets management seems to be the best answer when looking to gain a competitive edge. Furthermore, traditional approaches to knowledge management based on a "single company perspective" are becoming limited; more frequently the problem is to manage "inter‑organizational "collaborations, projects and temporary structures. It is thus necessary to rethink some organizational topics (organizational structures design, personnel involvement and motivation mechanisms etc.) and to review them by introducing suitable and effective modifications with respect to specific knowledge processes. This paper takes the "Organizational Relational Approach" into consideration and applies a method for describing and interpreting the interactions among organizational actors‑ also belonging to different organizations‑ defined as Organizational Relations (OR): the method analyses these relations according to several distinct dimensions: the goals of the OR and the level of sharing for the organizational actors; the organizational rules regulating the behaviour of actors within the OR; the technological and organizational tools supporting the OR; the cultural background associated to the OR. Only when all four dimensions are highly developed is it possible to qualify the existing organizational relations as "rich "or, in this context, as "knowledge intensive" relations. The paper applies the Organizational Relations method of analysis to a successful case study of knowledge transfer from the aerospace field to the health care field. We examined the joint research project carried out by the ASI,‑Italian Space Agency‑ Ferrari DTM and two Italian Orthopaedics Departments. This project has led to the industrial production of an innovative external bone‑setting device. This analysis explains the key factors for success and the effectiveness of the managerial decisions that were adopted. Empirical findings derived from the case study analysis on one hand and results obtained from the application of the Organizational Relational Method on the other have been found to be convergent and this constitutes a good validation of the method used.

Interdisciplinary project teams foster the creation of new ideas and innovations to meet customer needs and to challenge competition under the pre‑condition that the team and knowledge transfer processes are running smoothly and efficiently. In practice knowledge created in projects often is lost when the team splits up and the members return to their tasks in the organisation. This leads to inefficiency as time and money is spent in inventing things, which are already known inside the organisation. The case study outlines how knowledge and potentials for improvement can be explored and synergies can be realised. 0ur approach offers guidelines to accumulate transfer and utilize knowledge acquired in projects to improve future business. Through a knowledge‑oriented concept the consulting and software implementation process of the case study's company is optimised. This offers the possibility to integrate organisational change management know‑how and furthermore it gives the opportunity for a critical reflection of finished and ongoing projects. In this process "best practices" and "lessons learned" are explored to foster a better planning and realisation of projects on the long run.

The conceptual evolution of Knowledge Management (KM) has been supported by the use of flexible processes and several computational tools. The sophistication of these tools, incorporating the KM concepts, has been growing with time, creating functions better suited to knowledge creation processes. However, centralized Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) present some inconveniences, such as inflexible knowledge codification structures and centralised control. These may diminish the flexibility and the availability of knowledge through processes that standardize knowledge and information and remove them from the context. The suggestion of peer‑to‑peer (P2P) systems seems to promise to overcome these inconveniences by supporting interaction and knowledge sharing in simultaneous different contexts. The P2P systems provide real benefits to the interchange of knowledge among its peerscollaborators, but they are far from being a guarantee of interaction. We argue that the notion of ba is the design basis to obtain P2P systems closer to theoretical KM concepts. Peers can be encouraged to freely share knowledge without the constraints imposed by hierarchies or other organisational limitations. Interaction through P2P systems, supported by the ba concept, can make better use of autonomy to access and share personal knowledge without a centralized codification. P2P systems consubstantiate the ba concept thereby creating a new entity which we call "connecting ba". We believe that the "connecting ba" can give different visions and energy to the utilization of P2P systems. "Connecting ba" can also provide stimulation for virtual participation and for knowledge creation processes. Probably the most important implication of "connecting ba" is the possibility to incorporate peers within the spirit of ba, promoting collaboration for knowledge creation. The characteristics and the concept relations of these notions are enumerated and justified throughout the text.

Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives are driven by the need to preserve and share knowledge, in particular tacit knowledge that experts have built up in the course of doing their jobs. Such initiatives require key experts to be identified and their knowledge elicited. However, knowledge elicitation generally runs into a number of communication and motivational problems. These are well known in domains such as expert systems but it is only more recently that KM practitioners have become aware of them. Standard KM approaches separate the elicitation and, possibly, encoding of knowledge from its subsequent sharing. This paper outlines an approach where elicitation and transfer, and possibly also creation, are carried out in one process. This involves identifying key experts and stakeholders. These two groups then work together to develop a representation of the experts' domain knowledge. The role of the KM specialist thus becomes one of facilitation rather than elicitation. This approach has a number of advantages. It is more likely to engage the interest of experts and so avoid some of the motivational problems that are commonly encountered in knowledge elicitation. It does not rely on knowledge management specialists who do not share the experts' language, to capture and record their expertise. In particular the approach helps overcome the perceptual biases of domain experts. It is well known that perception is often selective and that judgements can be anchored on false premises. Experts are not immune from these biases but they are more likely to be eliminated as a result of the critical dialogue that occurs between experts and stakeholders using our approach. Our approach has been developed in the course of an action research project with a major engineering company. Staff who worked on a help desk had particular expertise which was of interest to other departments, such as design and production. The research data gathered was necessarily qualitative since the focus of concern was on the richness of transfer achieved. Early results suggest that communication or motivation problems encountered by conventional approaches are avoided and that a richer transfer of knowledge results. In particular it helps to identify and capture relevant tacit knowledge. The resulting representation may also form the starting point for a knowledge base which will be available to a wider community.

This work discusses how knowledge gatekeepers' intervention in the process of innovations and technology transfer was developed and applied in the manufacturing, financial and R&D firms in Rwanda and Uganda. The study was based on 150 questionnaires distributed, and used to collect empirical data. Furthermore, 25 interviews were conducted within ten organizations and fifteen well known opinion leaders and recognised experts in the fields concerned by this study. In an examination of the role of gatekeeper of knowledge in knowledge transfer processes the study has found that knowledge gatekeepers maybe individual, a firm, or a department within an organization. Furthermore, individuals working as knowledge gatekeepers must adapt to the recipient culture and knowledge sharing practice if they are to effect change. For technological innovations and knowledge transfer, the study found that the role of gatekeepers can be a multidimensional one, ranging from being trust and relationship builders, ambassadors within and from originating firms to receiving firms, and flag bearers. On the basis of the evidences obtained, the study has found no evidence to suggest that, in a gatekeeper's intervention within the knowledge creation process, there are no evidences that, in case of a firm acting as a knowledge gatekeeper, may necessarily develop asymmetries as well as put in place destructive mechanisms to restrain potential competitors within the sector from developing similar products or that they would necessarily incorporate innovative SMEs in their network who may provide related products to the leading firm.

With accelerated market volatility, faster response times and increased globalization, business environments are going through a major transformation and firms have intensified their search for strategies which can give them competitive advantage. This requires that companies continuously innovate, to think of new ideas that can be transformed into products, processes or services, generating value for the firm. Innovative solutions and processes are usually developed by a group of people, working together. A grouping of people that share and create new knowledge can be considered as a Community of Practice (CoP). CoPs are places which provide a sound basis for organizational learning and encourage knowledge creation and acquisition. Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoPs) can perform a central role in promoting communication and collaboration between members who are dispersed in both time and space. Nevertheless, it is known that not all CoPs and VCoPs share the same levels of performance or produce the same results. This means that there are factors that enable or constrain the process of knowledge creation. With this in mind, we developed a case study in order to identify both the motivations and the constraints that members of an organization experience when taking part in the knowledge creating processes of VCoPs. Results show that organizational culture and professional and personal development play important roles in these processes. No interviewee mentioned direct financial reward as a motivation factor for participation in VCoPs. Most identified the difficulty in aligning objectives, established by the management, with justification of the time spent in the VCoP. The interviewees also said that technology is not a constraint.

The purpose of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the well known knowledge dynamics model elaborated by Ikujiro Nonaka and his co‑workers. The essence of this model consists of three layers of the knowledge‑creation process: (a) the process o