Knowledge Intensive Services' Suppliers and Clients

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suggests this is a widely shared perception). Within the client, externalisation
may involve the learning that has been achieved as a result of the
interaction with KIBS taking concrete form in mission statements, codified
organisational concepts, new metrics for accounting, new decision
models, etc. A similar process may be underway in the KIBS, too, as it
seeks to reproduce the learning and innovations attained through the interaction
with specific clients.
Glückler (1999) and Schulz (2000) are among authors who touch on such a cycle of
knowledge generation, noting that consultants learn from the businesses to whom
they supply knowledge. Inter-organisational learning is involved, rather than
one-way knowledge transfer, in many cases. Explicit or, often, implicit knowledge
is “extracted” from the client firm by the KIBS, and this knowledge is used in
successive KIBS services, quite possibly including those supplied to other clients.
Den Hertog (2000) also cites the Nonaka & Takeuchi model, suggesting that it
emphases several points relevant to the KIBS-client interface:
• The combination of more tacit and explicit, codified forms of
knowledge (information) exchange in organisational learning.
• The role of interaction between team members and employees from
various organisations in creating knowledge new to the firm, so that the
knowledge base of the client firm is enriched by confrontation with that
of the KIBS provider.This mainly involves personal interactions
between professionals – thus the client firm must have access to
professionals who can participate in such dialogue.
• The dynamic nature of “knowledge conversion processes” in which
various forms of tacit and explicit knowledge are constantly mixed,
redefined, linked, exchanged, reshaped and enriched as KIBS and their
clients interact. KIBS can trigger and strengthen such processes in
clients, acting as catalysts, who help internal communication and
knowledge conversion. For example, new project teams are set up,
employees are forced to interact, to make tacit knowledge explicit, to
think about new combinations of knowledge and rethink their mental
models.
Den Hertog (2000) sees the KIBS-client relationship as varying along several
dimensions, among which that of explicit/codified knowledge versus
tacit/non-codified knowledge is but one important case. Though there is rarely a
price tag on exchange of tacit forms of knowledge, they are at least as important in