When the general meets the particular: The Practices and Challenges of Interorganizational Knowledge Reuse

Organizations derive knowledge from their experience and, more often, from the experience of other organizations, which usually comes embodied in the form of technologies, practices, methods, and norm

Knowledge reuse refers to the practice of reapplying knowledge that has been previously acquired or developed in one context to another context. This can involve reusing knowledge within an organization or attempting to reuse knowledge from outside organizational boundaries

We found that partners relied on the general knowledge they had acquired along their careers, and they tried to convey their knowledge to junior consultants, who in turn were encouraged to adopt and enact their newly acquired knowledge as they interacted with clients. Yet the junior consultants had trouble reusing general knowledge because they were embedded in particular contexts and, perhaps ironically, because they regularly interacted with clients.

Since they could not reuse general knowledge, they ended up developing novel insights in the course of their engagement.

Depicts a process in which firms develop a solution based on existing knowledge, create demand, and then sell and deliver the solution to other organizations

Knowledge can be challenging for a variety of reasons. In the context of interorganizational knowledge reuse, some of the challenges include

• social and structural barriers
• difficulty in searching for relevant knowledge
• transferring complex knowledge across organization subunits integrating knowledge in groups
• acting on acquired knowledge
• offering a unique value proposition by reusing knowledge
• protecting the firm's knowledge from imitation by competitors

Additionally, knowledge is often rooted in particular social contexts, which can make it difficult to transfer from one place to another.

Finally, knowledge management systems that attempt to "commodify expertise," but ignore context, are imperfect solutions to knowledge reuse.

In the interorganizational context, challenges are likely to be even more acute. Interorganizational projects in which agents negotiate a variety of interests, identities, and interpretations to engage in shared interactions are likely to foreground power relations. Power relations and status hierarchies from each individual organization come into contact with each other, while the novelty and thus ambiguity of the engagement opens a space for their negotiation and reconfiguration. The role of power and politics in interorganizational knowledge-sharing relationships is also discussed

1. First, the junior consultants were highly intelligent, yet, unlike the partners, lacked prior knowledge about hospitals and healthcare. This led them to question the appropriateness of general solutions for their particular site. They also relied on their own idiosyncratic experience, introducing ideas from unrelated fields of inquiry and helping others to see old problems in new ways.
2. Second, because the junior consultants, unlike the partners, interacted frequently with people at the client site, they continuously confronted inconsistencies between general solutions and the particular context of WCH, and they were subject to tensions between the ground-level employees at WCH and the lofty promises of “transformation.”
3. Finally, the problem-solving process not only required junior consultants to interact with clients but also provided a means for clients’ own ideas to surface and suggested that these ideas should, in fact, be taken seriously.

• First, the junior consultants were inexperienced, even if sometimes knowledgeable in other domains that encouraged alternative perspectives, and empowered to question the partners’ guidance.
• Second, their interactions with the client highlighted inconsistencies between general knowledge to be reused and particular circumstances that rendered reuse problematic.
• Third, the use of a collaborative problem-solving approach led to the generation of new solutions that, by definition, had never been used in prior engagements.

Collectively, these features challenged attempts to reuse knowledge—though they may well have considerably increased the actual effectiveness of the consulting intervention.

• First, knowledge is translated into generalizations by the partners who have seen numerous examples of similar situations.
• Second, reuse is facilitated by templates and processes intended to enable general insights to be reused in particular situations. Although these templates and processes suggest that knowledge is customized to a context and even emerge from it, consultants attempt to direct the outcome of these templates and processes toward knowledge reuse.
• Third, reuse is facilitated by the presence of junior consultants themselves, who act as the channels for knowledge reuse.

1. The findings of the study directly address calls to study the interaction process between consultants and their clients, highlighting the importance of examining the roles played by different members of a consulting firm.

2. The study shows how macro-level factors tied to the strategy and organization of a consulting firm interact with the way that knowledge is reused (or not), problems are defined (or redefined), and solutions are modified or developed.

3. The limitations of the study point to the need for further grounded studies of how the work of individuals within consultancies unfolds and how knowledge reuse attempts and challenges may unfold across organizations as a whole