Consultants and knowledge transfer

"Do you/are you going to include knowledge transfer as a part of value creation?"

someone asked me. But consultants are less purveyors of knowledge than knowledge brokers. They facilitate transfer of knowledge between client parties rather than from themselves to the client. Andrew Sturdy at Warwick knows this. He and his colleagues on an ESRC project spent months doing the sort of research I'd love to do. It was reported here in 2007.

So my thesis will have to explain something about knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange.

Transfer of knowledge

It's been bugging me - how does transfer of knowledge link with social capital?

One of our first year PhDs had a problem with Endnote. If you import a reference and it comes with capitals, then how can you automatically change it so in your references it isn't capitals? He came to ask me as one of the second years in the room. (This is an open plan office with desks for around 30 people, around 15-16 of whom are students and the rest are academics.) I knew it had to be something with the template but didn't know what, so I faffed about a bit, looking on templates that did and didn't change the CAPITALISATION but then went back to what I was doing.

First year student returned an hour later having worked out how to do it and told me.

So there's a transfer of knowledge - in one minute I knew, and so did the third year student who over heard. There's value from knowing and being in the same room as that first year and we saved two more hours of two other students searching independently. Why did he come and ask? Probably because he knew in the first place that other students are approachable, because the room lends itself to moving around casually and asking, because he suspected I might already know, which he could guess from already having chatted over coffee. See coffee video - he's often at coffee with us. So sharing coffee builds social capital and shares learning.

Student to student presentation

Knowledge transfer - what is it? HaiYan has been researching this in Chinese mergers and acquisitions, and been in the OUBS for a year on loan from Peking University. She presented some of her work to us this morning. First she defined knowledge transfer (Cutler 1989) then explained some models such as

• Shannons
• Szulanski 1996
• Jeffrey & Teng 2003 and Grant 1996

From these models she's taken 5 elements to create the factors she will use for her analysis. She told us about her literature review on knowledge transfer in mergers and acquisitions, then explained her strategy.

Who came?
We had a good turn out with three students from each of the first, second and third year PhDs plus a fourth year and an MRes student.

Some of us know about knowledge transfer, some of us are researching M&A and some of us are more experienced with statistics. So HaiYan was able to take away some of our thoughts and advice. For example, how to layout some of the questions on her survey, or who to contact in the OU on statistics.

And we finished with a scrumptious leaving cake for her.