INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN A CONSULTANCY PRACTICE

Know-how (knowledge, skill and experience) is the principal resource that the consultancy firm offers its clients. Technology transfer is the firm's ability to apply these to the benefit of its clients.

The reason an organization might turn to a consultancy firm for help is for the resources that it offers. A particular firm may be employed for a number of reasons, including:

• It has knowledge that the organization does not have.

• Although the organization has the knowledge, it does not have as much experience in applying it as the consultancy firm does, or needs the objective view of an outsider.

• Although the organization has the knowledge and experience, it does not have them sufficiently available to engage in the project.

A consultancy firm therefore needs to ensure that it has the resources (in terms of the skill mix and volume) required to meet the needs of organizations in its marketplace. These needs are, of course, changing and so a firm should aim to have the knowledge and experience required to meet these changing needs through selective recruitment and training.

Several points merit consideration concerning technology transfer:

• A firm should operate not only in responsive mode; it should alert its clients to opportunities and needs, of which the clients may otherwise be unaware. To this end, a firm should be 'horizon scanning' continually. Sometimes a large practice might have an advisory board or panel to help with this, made up partly of outsiders, such as academics, business people, politicians and civil servants. They would alert the firm to trends, opportunities and innovations, which might affect the firm's clientele and its own business. Even without an advisory panel, the consultancy business manager should make sure that horizon scanning is done regularly.

• The firm should be able to put together its knowledge and experience in ways that are attractive to its clients (this is product and market development: see Chapter 3). This does not mean that consultancy offerings are unilaterally the work of the consultancy firm; they may result from strategic alliances with other firms or individuals. Anyhow, they should be put forward as offering synergy between firm and client and, perhaps, developed jointly with the client. There has to be some basis for a discussion to start, however, and the firm should take the initiative on this.

• The firm must deliver its knowledge and experience to its clients effectively. This means that individual consultants must be able to work in a client environment (see below under 'Attracting and retaining talented people' regarding personal development). Collectively, the firm must offer operating methodologies that ease technology transfer and the ability to put together teams of consultants who can work together effectively.

This last point is important. The consultancy firm's know-how consists not only of the knowledge that it deploys to the benefit of its clients, but also skills in deploying that knowledge. These skills result from experience - experience that belongs to individual consultants within the firm. A key process, therefore, is capturing individual learning and making it corporately available - often embodied in standard procedures or guidelines. Knowledge acquisition and diffusion processes are hence an important component of corporate performance.

These take time. At the simplest level, they require consultant teams to undertake project reviews and to capture and disseminate the lessons learned. Unless this is enforced as a formal discipline, consultants often prefer to move on to the next project with no pause for reflection, and the opportunity for organizational learning is lost.

It is only in recent years that knowledge management has gained widespread attention, but this is perhaps the most helpful paradigm for a consultancy firm. Processes of management should enhance this acquisition and distribution of know-how to the benefit of consultants and clients.