The article presents a case study of pedagogical experimentation of teaching for creativity in a French high engineering school offering training in electronics and computer science. The experimental project encompasses i) new instructional design – specific, systematic methods and tools deliberately supporting creativity and ii) new learning environments – physical space configurations, material objects, artefacts and digital tools. The experimentation is rooted in the socio-material perspective in human geography and sociology that highlights that physical space interacts and interrelates with the social world ( (Massey, 2005), (Lefebvre, 1991) and (Soja, 1989)). It attempts to contribute to emerging field in educational research linking learning environments and training for creativity (Tsai et al., 2015; Studente et al., 2015; Tekic et al., 2015). The early findings of the research suggest that relationship between space and learning for creativity seem not to be straightforward or linear, or at least, cannot be measured with currently available tools and methods. Instead, teachers and learners go through phases of discovery, experimentation and co-construction of new codes of behaviour, practices and attitudes in the new physical space. They create a new social space for interactions afforded by physical space and boundary objects. At organizational level, these processes may impact organizational practices, routines and codes of conduct.

The study aims at explaining how Internet and interactive technologies are driving museums as institutions information-based, knowledge and learning oriented to reconcile both traditional authority and increasing participation of audience on cultural heritage by structuring virtual museums as environments for learning by enhancing educational mission and purposes. Museums seeking legitimacy by embracing new technologies contribute to generate social value and promote social innovation managing cultural heritage coherently with new trends of participation in cultural activities based on information, communication and knowledge sharing by designing virtual environments for involving audience to take part in the cultural production. This study is based on archival and qualitative data drawn by literature review about the use of the internet technologies of information and communication within museums. New technologies are leading museums as organizations audience-driven to reinvent the educational mission and behave as hybrid organizations managing different and competing logics to combine traditional authority on definition of cultural meaning of artefacts with opening up to active participation of users by encouraging new cultural and learning experiences beyond the virtual museum moving from preserving collection to managing information towards a participatory and knowledge oriented museum. Museums managing information and knowledge through museum professionals dealing with new technologies enforce the logics authority that benefits of increased participation becoming centres and spaces of social innovation for knowledge sharing and learning development.

Through the “Gozzini” Law, the Italian penitentiary system identifies inmates’ re-education as the main aim of personal detention; theatrical performances are included among the treatments which are intended at promoting the inmates’ social reintegration. Prison theatre allows the establishment of a performing space, which paves the way for the activation of innovative learning processes. Drawing from the knowledge creation theory, this study is aimed at examining the prison theatre phenomenon, which is eventually conceived as “Ba”, a physical, virtual, and symbolic space where the mutual interactions between different agents fosters the creation of cathartic and transformative knowledge. Drawing from the “double loop learning” perspective, an in-depth exploratory case-study was performed. It concerned the prison theatre initiatives launched by the Penal Institution of Naples-Secondigliano, in the South of Italy. A qualitative approach is adopted, which allowed to deal with the main issues of analysis from both a conceptual and an empirical standpoint. To improve the reliability of this study, the evidence collected were drawn from multiple sources, 1) internal archives of the Italian Ministry of Justice; 2) semi-structured interviews; and 3) external sources. The triangulation of evidence collected allowed to achieve a stronger consistency of the findings discussed. The relevance of this study is twofold, contributing in both conceptual (observation) and theoretical terms (abstraction) to a widely overlooked shade of knowledge creation, appropriation and sharing. To the knowledge of the authors, penal institutions are still poorly examined by scholars interested in public management, in spite of their role in enhancing both social and economic development in current societies. The case-study discussed provides an in-depth exploratory analysis of prison theatre, adopting the phenomenological perspective of “Ba”. The findings of the research point out the key tools to make prison theatre a physic and symbolic place, where inmates are able to build knowledge and can “reborn” through the process of knowledge sharing. This study paves the way for two important contributions, 1) it encourages a cross-fertilization between managerial science and juridical, sociological and pedagogical disciplines, which are relatively more rooted in the penitentiary environment; 2) it incites an improvement of traditional managerial and organizational practices in the penitentiary system.

The purpose of this article is to deliver an analysis of the communicational nature of creative knowledge, by forging a link to the informational logic of the post-modern society. Creative knowledge is perceived as an attribute of an information world, which explains the growing penetration of creativity into contemporary social (and economic in particular) relationships. Creative knowledge is considered an integrated element of the architecture of knowledge, which is expressed through different forms and processes of communication. The ways in which communicational mechanisms structure and handle creative knowledge are analysed. A concept is brought forward that is based on the objectification of creativity with the help of communicational tools of creative knowledge. The underlying assumption here is the influence of communicational expressions of creative knowledge, which explains the increasing penetration of modern creativity into social and economic relations, by actualising the communicational approach. The proposed conception is broader interpretation of 3T presumptions model (Technology, Talent, Tolerance) by R. Florida from the communication perspective, which involves an analysis of the 3C (Creativity, Creative Knowledge, Communication) triangle. The key structural logical aspects of the report are as follows, Creativity paradigms and assumptions for its substantiation and objectification Evaluation (measurement) of creativity Methodological basics of the concept of creative knowledge Communicational organisation of creativity This methodology puts in evidence the fact that creativity can be organised and managed through application of communicational tools to structures of creative knowledge. The article methodologically formulates presumptions for substantialising and managing creativity. According to the 3C concept that has been developed, creativity is grounded on creative knowledge and communication mechanisms. At the same time, criteria for the evaluation and effectiveness of creativity are being formulated. Equally important are studies of the media and procedural expressions of creative knowledge, which are summarised as communicational criteria of effectiveness, discussing their applications and possibilities. From the practical point of view, creative knowledge communication boosts the outcomes of creativity and the potential for managing creative processes. The essential relationship between creativity and the modern society is expressed through the integration of creative processes into value-generating chains and models, as well as into the new structures of the global factors of competitiveness. It is suggested that creativity is an assumption of the existence of the post-modern society and competitive relations, which requires strengthening the economic and social effectiveness of creative activities.

This study highlights the huge diversity of the possible theoretical views of the role of knowledge in tourism destination networks. For this purpose, this paper provides a synoptic comparison of the relevant explanations and predictions that can be deduced from six important theoretical views, including both well-established, mainstream organizational theories and emerging inter-disciplinary approaches. The six theoretical clusters considered for this study are investigated through a comparative analysis of the literature. The results are synthesized in a prediction matrix. The results of this study show that the six theories differ significantly as for the expected benefits and success factors of knowledge management and organizational learning in tourism destination networks. Overall, the six-theory matrix offers a rich and complex framework with a strong explanatory potential, which calls for the setting-up of clear criteria of meta-theoretical brokering and integration. In the final part of the paper, the authors discuss the managerial implications of the six-theory prediction matrix. In particular, the authors highlight the possible usefulness of the pluralism of possible management criteria implied by the prediction matrix.

Drawing on the micro-foundations view of strategy, we examine the role of individuals in organizational learning and reveal the micro-macro interactions underpinning the emergence of a firm-level absorptive capacity. Whereas most of the absorptive capacity research focuses on interaction of external and internal environments, we emphasise the interplay between organizational and individual levels of absorptive capacity. We find that the nature of knowledge, the role of individuals and their social interactions are explicitly addressed in the seminal works of Cohen and Levinthal. However, these micro-level considerations are insufficiently problematized in subsequent research. This neglect has resulted in limited explanations of how absorptive capacity emerges as an organizational-level phenomenon. In this study, we employ a longitudinal case study design to explore the role of individual learning in the emergence of a firm-level absorptive capacity. We selected one multinational, knowledge intensive firm as our research setting. Data has been collected over a ten-year period. The focal firm operates in a mature industry, experiences technological disruptions and global pressure to innovate, and, hence, provides opportunity to explore how absorptive capacity emerges over time as a consequence of individual’s learning. Based on a longitudinal case study, we re-conceptualize absorptive capacity as a set of three, sequentially inter-linked learning processes in which individual and organization interact and suggest three propositions for further empirical research. We show how absorptive capacity emerges into an organizational learning capability that involves the micro-level knowledge processes that underpin absorptive capacity of an organization. Our findings reveal how tacit, situated, and distributed organizational knowledge affects the development of absorptive capacity as an organizational learning capability. This is achieved by distinguishing between individual- and organizational-level attributes of absorptive capacity, and through examining their dynamic interactions within each phase of absorptive capacity process—i.e., the recognition of value, the assimilation, and the application of new external knowledge to commercial ends.

This study investigates how the organization of and access to different sources of data, information and knowledge create absorptive capacity that contributes to first/prime mover competitive advantages. It is an explorative single case study (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007,29) of a shipping firm delivering services to the offshore oil industry. The study has an ethnographical flavor in that we where ‘part of the organization’ in formal and informal settings in intensive periods over a long time span. The interaction was limited to a group of the top twenty managers at the company headquarter. We use a phenomen-oriented approach (Alvesson and Kärreman 2007; von Krogh et al., 2012; Schwartz and Stensaker, 2014, Doh, 2015) that starts with an empirical phenomenon and uses different streams of theories to establish understanding of the phenomenon. While many studies of how firms use data and information to make grounded decisions few studies have been conducted at a micro-level focusing on the organization and interaction between information and knowledge from different sources. The study shows how analytical tools based on “big data” functions as input to a process where social knowledge provides the context that create meaning to these data. The study is original in providing insights concerning knowledge, skills and data necessary for exercising management and leadership to establish absorptive capacity to sustain as a prime mover advantage. The phenomenon studied is foundation processes for creating absorptive capacity. There are several outcomes of this phenomenon-oriented study. It is practical because it identifies and analyses real world firm challenges and point to practical solutions that not necessary can be deduced from theory. While most studies of knowledge and absorptive capacity are done at a macro level, with intentions to find significant relations between variables across organizational units, this study identifies organizational mechanisms in use at the micro-level to achieve absorptive capacity. Which in turn represent challenges for managers both to contextualize and implement in other business settings. It is also theoretical important because it frames practical behavior that cut across different streams of knowledge creation as theoretical conversations concerning dynamic capabilities, organizational learning, strategy and knowledge management.

It has been conferred on the Higher Education Institutions (HEI), knowledge transfer, training and development of scientific research, but it is thanks to the intellectual capital that universities achieve their corporate goals, to allow quantification and measurement intangible assets such as human, relational and structural capital to manage their resources. Proper management of intellectual capital enables a further increase in the competitiveness of higher institution. This research focused on identifying the relationship between intellectual capital and competitiveness variables in four universities in Mexico The base of intellectual capital (IC) is knowledge, intangible resource and major source of innovation in creating value for organizations and competitiveness (Diaz, 2012), it is considered a resource of knowledge that organizations use to generate a lead competitive (Kwantes, 2007). The quantitative study was cut, descriptive, explanatory and correlational in which the relationship between intellectual capital and competitiveness, implemented in IES of Mexico is established through a survey of 120 academics who collaborated on the study. The questionnaire was designed with 73 closed questions using Likert scale to inquire about the intellectual capital and the factors influencing competitiveness as IES, obtaining a Cronbach alpha reliability of .858. Frequencies were obtained by sphericity test for the characterization of teachers and factor analysis was applied to the correlation of variables finally performing the ANOVA for hypothesis testing. The methodology to analyze the correlation between intellectual capital and competitiveness variable, HEI where the study was applied. The results of the study show that planning, leadership, measurement, technology, vision and strategy, decision making, learning and knowledge in higher education institutions influencing competitiveness and create an opportunity to develop intellectual capital and increase their quality.

The paper explores the relationship between different types of intellectual capital and product innovation of a company. The study uses resource-based view as a theoretical framework. Drawing on literature review the authors put forward the hypotheses about the positive influence of human, structural and relational capital on the probability of transition to higher level of product novelty. Using the dataset for more than 1600 Russian small and medium size companies from manufacturing industry and implementing logistic regression analysis the authors test the hypotheses put forward. The results established in this study confirm the hypothesis of positive relationship between endowment of intellectual capital and the novelty level of a product introduced by a company. The study also extends empirical knowledge on innovation performance and intellectual capital employment in the context of Russian business environment.

Intellectual Capital (IC) has been argued to be the key element of value creation in contemporary economies, and this argument has been widely supported by empirical research, based on data from developed markets. Yet, despite strong interest in the topic and growing body of research focused on it, neither academics nor practitioners have come to one single conclusion concerning which elements of intellectual capital – human, relational or organizational – play a more important role in value creation of a company and how they influence different aspects of organizational performance. It also remains unclear whether it is important for a firm to have all elements of intellectual capital – human, relational and structural capital – well-developed, or managers can focus just only on one or two of them, if they have limited resources. These questions are particularly burning for emerging markets’ firms. Does IC matter much in this context? Based on previous research one can also question whether IC matters at all, and, more importantly, whether investing in all elements of intellectual capital would not be too heavy a burden for a company that would deteriorate its’ performance. This study aims to explore this question by analyzing the joint effects of human, relational and organizational capital on organizational performance in an emerging Russian market. The data for the research was collected in January-March 2015. The sample comprises 240 Russian companies. The findings of the paper suggest that having several elements of intellectual capital well-developed simultaneously does not bring additional value in enhancing organizational performance of Russian companies. Therefore, managers can focus on developing only those elements of intellectual capital that matter most – that is structural capital, according to our findings. This brings us to the conclusion of the specifics of the Russian market. The findings contribute to further development of IC theory by providing a more fine-grained understanding of how different elements interact in the particular emerging economy context. The core managerial implication of this study is that building structural capital, providing employees with efficient and relevant information systems and tools to support cooperation between employees, as well as carefully documenting organizational knowledge and making it easily accessible for employees, should be a management focus for manufacturing companies.

Our aim is to explore to what extent, and in what ways, can theatre be used in the learning process when the focus is on deepening the leadership skills of managers. This paper focuses on the concept of arts-based initiatives (ABI) as knowledge co-creation in a group of practitioners. The unit of analysis is a theatrical performance exercise (TPE) at a Marines’ Military Academy. Through observational and interview data gathered at this Academy, a case study approach is used to explore the experiences of participants in a performance exercise, where the task is to plan, organize and execute the play as a group. This includes, scripts, characters, role-plays, costumes, stage decoration, sound, promotion and performance of the theatre play. We situate theatre as knowledge co-creation within ABIs framework, review related literature and then analyse the experiences of military students throughout the process of creating and performing the theatre play. Finally, we present key findings about the kinds of value that the military students identified in the theatrical experience. In the end, we conclude as to how theatre can be used in the learning process, when the focus is placed on deepening leadership skills of managers, and identify the benefits that can emerge from it. There is a growing cry for ways of approaching management and leadership development that embrace the perplexed environments of contemporary organisational contexts. One response has been the use of arts-based initiatives (ABIs) for management and leadership education. Schiuma’s (2011) study suggests arts-based working has effects both on people and on organizational infrastructure with varying effects and intensities. In this study we are interested in exploring what possible benefits could emerge from ABI. Namely, understanding theatre in military training as a value driver to develop leadership skills and to organizing reflection via arts-based approaches (Pässilä & Vince, 2015) and critical creativity concerned with understanding (Adams and Owens, 2015), This paper speaks to knowledge management researchers, professionals, and development practitioners, the study overviews the growing trend of ABIs and its possible benefits, highlighting reflection on and of emotions, thoughts and challenges.

This report brings forward the possibility of capturing creativity and human experience through a visual ethnography approach, applying the use of ‘zines’ as a means of capturing individual engagement with a process. Zines are small (maga)zines from the do-it-yourself movement. They began as a means for fans to express their support of favourite musicians. They are a means to express collective voice from the ground up, less formal than a publication produced by an entity, but formal enough to be considered publications in their own right. Zines can be handcrafted in rough method or can be beautifully designed and produced to very high standards. Zines are presented in this paper as a method of collecting and analysing data within a framework of qualitative analysis that retains more of the shape of the complete experience (Dewey). This is done so as to maintain a more overall sense of what the experience was for an individual participating in an activity within the organisational context. Accounting for experience only through evidence, this paper argues, loses many important elements of experience, such as tacit engagement, experiential knowledge, and individual judgement. What is being lost, this paper argues, is the human creative input and engagement with experiences in the organisational and workplace context. For IFKAD 2016, we propose to produce materials ahead of the conference (in the form of an advanced colouring book or a photo album) and invite participants to gather materials, notate impressions, draw and photograph in response to their experience in the conference. We aim for this zine to be a holistic record of a process, incorporating both positive and negative elements as a way of informing future activities. At the end of the conference, the researchers will collect and analyse the individual zines submitted by the conference participants and prepare an edited summarised publication of key impressions as made by the participants themselves as a response to the conference. This work proposed could be done solely for the Creative Coordination track or could involve all members attending the conference. The aim is is to implement this as a qualitative means of accounting for human experience by using IFKAD 2016 as a testing ground. Can we capture the thinking and impressions in this way to account for creativity and inform new methods? The researchers will co-create the materials to go into the. At the end of the conference, we will gather all mini publications from all the conference attendees who took part and create an edited summarised publication as a response to the conference. This will constitute a qualitative record of the creative endeavour during the conference.

In recent years, liminality has become one of the key concepts in delineating the features of contemporary working life. In organizations, it has been particularly connected with an episodic process, where the organization is led to a self-reflexive state in order to provide a space for the participants to create a renewed understanding of the organization and its culture. However, prior research has paid little attention to the way such liminal states may be constructed in actual organizational life. In this study, we will approach liminality as a distinctive interactional space and investigate how it is accomplished as a concerted activity of the participants. By focusing on the micro-level organization of the participants’ social conduct, we aim to demonstrate the complex changes taking place in interaction and the way they are used to create a space for shared self-reflection and knowledge construction the liminal state is set up to evoke and advance. Our data originate from a personnel training of a public, knowledge intensive organization. The training events were attended by 60-250 staff members, the management of the organization and one or more consultants from the company the training was purchased from. The events were videotaped for the purposes of this study, leading to approximately 30 hours of data. This data was then analyzed by applying multimodal interaction analysis. In our analysis, we will investigate the sequential unfolding of the training event, focusing on three specific phases in its overall structure: 1) the opening talk of the consultant, 2) the construction of narratives through group work and 3) the joint closing discussion. Our focus is on the interactional and discursive construction of these phases and the way they contribute to the creation of the training as an interactional activity type. By doing so, we will demonstrate how the liminal state of the training commences from the interplay between different phases of the event. The study will bring a new understanding of the interactional accomplishment of liminality as a transformational space for shared knowledge construction and organizational learning. Moreover, it will provide opportunities for professional reflection in terms of how to best utilize such interactional spaces for different organizational activities. In conclusion, we will discuss these views and reflect how the results of the study could be applied in the professional practice of consultation concerned with knowledge work.

SUFUvet is a cross-disciplinary teaching-learning project designed to adapt students’ soft skills and track usability and the concrete surplus value of work techniques in the field of visual media design. For SUFUvet, a collaboration between the Institute of Food Hygiene/University of Leipzig and the Media Center/Technische Universität Dresden was initiated. Bachelor students of media informatics generate 3D visualisations in the framework of SCRUM: Undergraduate veterinary students issue instructions in order to create an e-learning class. During the project, questionnaires, group discussions, and feedback methods are used to detect changes in selected soft skills. This design is meant to increase knowledge and employability by adapting student’s media, communication, and project management competences. Using SCRUM appears to be a new approach, not only in the field of programming, but for media production as well. Additionally, it offers an interdisciplinary work environment, which is rare but considered fruitful within university studies. The outcomes of the application are a 3D-visualised meat inspection e-learning class for veterinary students plus a documentation of SCRUM as a framework for visual media design. It is seen as an experiment for future applications in a variety of cross-disciplinary learning and media design cases.

Meeting notes are effective records for participants and a source of information for members who were unable to attend. They act as a reference point to decisions made, to plan next steps, and to identify and track action items. Despite the need for a multi meeting solution (Tucker and Whittaker, 05), meetings are often displayed as separated as well as descriptive documents. The aim of this work is to enhance access to overlapping meeting contents and existing coherences beyond a decoupled description. A visual representation of meeting content can lead to meeting records which are more comprehensible and more time efficient. Furthermore, it enables the depiction of knowledge that is often lost in conventional meeting records. Our goal was to define a general structure for meeting items, integrating content categories and relations between successive meetings. In this paper, we present a model based approach to visualize meeting content as well as content relations in order to support the preparation, execution and follow-up of meetings. Due to the fact that contents of consecutive meetings refer to each other (Post et al., 04), we consider meetings as a series of events. The resulting model substantiates the transformation of content as well as content relations into a visual form. The proposed solution focuses on the model that is integrated into an interactive visualization. Thus, a novel approach to explore meeting records is provided. The model was proved to be suitable for meeting contents in various use cases. Examining the content in its visual representation across multiple consecutive meetings enhances the identification of any linked information at a glance over even long periods of time. Hence, important pieces of information will not be disregarded. The approach of our multi meeting protocol application is realized as a browser-based implementation that displays data from JSON objects. With this interactive visualization, the user can browse, search, and filter meeting content and get a deeper understanding of topics, their life cycle and relations to other topics. This leads to an overall comprehension of project or business progression that highlights topics that need to be addressed. Thus, the viewer is supported in preparing, executing, and following up meetings successfully and qualified to structure records in order to keep a clean transcript of a meeting.

Design idea generation is a significant part of a designer’s work and most frequently associated with creative problem solving. However, an outstanding challenge in design is translating empirical findings into ideas or knowledge that inform design, also known as generating implications for design. Though great efforts have been made to bridge this gap, there is still no overall consensus on how best to incorporate fieldwork data into the design idea generation process. The generation of design ideas is a process that is rooted in individual knowledge and is often considered a precedent-based type of reasoning, where knowledge is continuously transformed to produce new knowledge and this creative leap across the divide is very difficult. And it is believed that designers could potentially benefit from external stimuli that would provide a starting point or trigger and make the ideas generation more efficient. Most researchers have examined when and what type of stimuli designers used to support design idea generation. Nevertheless, it is still not clear how the different types of stimuli are retrieved and transformed during idea generation phases, and the knowledge transformation during this phases need to be clarified. In order to resolve this issue I conduct an open-ended semi-structured qualitative interview to learn about student and professional designers’ knowledge on how they select stimuli and transform it into design ideas, then compare with professor’s opinions. The interview would be conducted in terms of one-on-one face to face or online interview depending on the availability and accessibility of the interview respondents which would be audio recorded. Knowing more about how different designers, especially professional designers, to retrieve and transform preferred stimuli into ideas, and the design thinking involved in the process, is a significant step towards investigating the influence of stimuli during idea generation. Ultimately, I intend to build a general mechanism for designers to conduct an appropriate selection of functionally useful stimuli to transfer empirical findings to knowledge that inform design. The results try to help professional designers get more scientific structure, give student designers more practical guidance, but also help design education refine design idea generation methods and improve resulting techniques to discover a dynamic balance among theory and practice.

Successful business performance and creating business value requires companies to manage their knowledge effectively and efficiently. This is especially true in project environment, so knowledge management (KM) became an important factor to successfully implement projects (Sokhanvar et al. 2014). In the last two decades many scholarly articles focused on the knowledge creation, location, capturing, and sharing process within the science of project management (Owen, 2008, Gudi and Becerra-Fernandez, 2006). Although the authors manly focused on the integration of knowledge management and project management processes (Levin, 2010), but significantly less attention was given to the content of the knowledge itself which was created during the project process. Scholars usually face with the difficulty of defining project knowledge, because of its complex concept. As Assudani (2005) says it is like “catching the chameleon”, which contributes to misconception that nowadays different words are used for the same knowledge phenomenon or – on the contrary – the same expressions refer to different types of knowledge. There is different understanding of the concept of knowledge both in theory and practice, so in this literature based explorative article the author reviews the evolution of project knowledge definition and provides a framework for the knowledge and knowledge types which are related to projects within the organisation. The main aim is to understand the concept of knowledge in its entirety and highlight what kinds of knowledge contents are created and also shared in subsequent projects. The author distinguishes horizontal and vertical dimensions of project knowledge. Horizontal dimension focuses on the nature and content (philosophy/epistemology, organisational studies and project management) of the project knowledge, while vertical dimension distinguishes the different knowledge competence levels. By the combination of horizontal and vertical project knowledge dimensions the author creates a comparative project knowledge model, where three project knowledge areas (Görög, 2013) focusing on the content of the project knowledge – including technical, human related and project-related knowledge elements – and the vertical dimensions reflect the levels of the project competence: knowledge, skill and attitude (Cleland, 1994). The model is also embedded into the personal and organisational learning context considering the importance of organisational culture and personal features. The article also introduce how the identified knowledge categories relate to the main project approaches (Shenhar and Dvir, 2007): project as a process, as temporary organisation (Lundin, Söderholm (1995), as the building block of the strategy. The article aims to understand the concept of knowledge in project environment and contribute to a general project knowledge approach.

Organisational culture plays an important role in the processes of knowledge creation, transfer, exploitation and exploration. It impacts on attraction, development and retention of human capital and thus contributes to (or hinders) the value creation process. The aim of the present paper is to study how small firms have adapted their strategies in response to requirements for higher dependence on knowledge, information and high-skill levels, and the role of the organisational culture in the resulting strategy implementation, to address “knowledge absence”. The research method chosen to explore the interrelationship between strategy, knowledge strategy and culture and day-to-day practices in place is qualitative. It consists of two phases. In the first phase semi-structured interviews were conducted with managerial staff of 22 small European Union (EU) firms (personnel less than 50 people) from three sectors that are considered to be knowledge-intensive, namely information technologies (IT), finance and tourism. In the second phase, in-depth case studies of two of the firms based on the data from the interviews were developed. The results of the research to date show that organisational culture links closely to the knowledge management strategies and practises in place and is an important factor impacting on the value creation process. This exploratory research provides evidence about good practices in relation to how successful knowledge strategies acknowledge and create an organisational culture that facilitates the process of generating knowledge resources and building human capital in the context of small businesses. The outcomes of this study contribute to the development of knowledge strategy theory and offer a useful practical framework to facilitate further empirical studies. The research findings and evidence of good practices will inform future research.

The seminar Scientific Communication – University goes to Town is part of the transfer strategy of the Innovation Office at the University of Münster. Students and other citizens collaborate in mixed groups, approach everyday problems and develop solutions together. On the one hand, this collaboration allows the students to gain practical experience and a profound view into the field of applied sciences. Thus, they broaden their professional horizon. The citizens, on the other hand, gain sophisticated solution-finding approaches, which can be transferred to the expert committees of the city council. The seminar is a solutions-finding-process, aiming at the collaboration of academic and non-academic participants. Both sides get in touch to share their particular knowledge and experience. This mix of students and citizens facilitates more efficient solutions on everyday problems during an intense solution-to-problems-finding-process. By bringing together the academic (theoretical) approach of the students and the pragmatic (practical) approach of the citizens, solution-seeking municipalities benefit from elaborated concepts and profound solutions. The seminar is part of the General Studies of the University of Münster. Therefore, students enrol to the seminar as part of their education. As a first step, citizens are encored to provide a selection of interesting problems of their daily lives. Afterwards, the students choose the different topics by interest, and are then selected and assigned to the topics, aiming at a variety of subjects within each group. The citizens are also assigned to the teams in accordance to their submitted topics. Following this preparatory phase, the teams start planning the solution-finding-process. Gradually, the teams develop a broad solution-driven approach and consider different pros and cons of the solution. The whole process is supervised by the Innovation Office to ensure a high-quality level of the interdisciplinary collaboration within the seminar. The seminar improves the problem solving skills of the participating students. This goes far beyond the theoretical character of the simulations that are typically used in the context of academic teaching in higher education. The excellent feedback of students confirms the significance of this connection to real settings. The seminar enables students to broaden their view on science and research. They learn to accept and cherish the meaning and importance of a strong collaboration with the non-scientific (and sometimes even non-academic) community. They also receive training in an expert-layperson-communication because they have to translate their research outcomes to a commonly understandable language.

In this paper a framework for innovative system thinking to solve returns (or reverse flows) that emerge within reverse logistics and reverse supply chain processes is presented. Such types of flows are typically not desired by managers and the appropriate effort to avoid their existence and/or to solve them efficiently and effectively for the future needs creativity, innovative approach and/or innovative and continuous improvement thinking of people working with returns. Literature dealing with reverse flows is almost silent in any linkages to innovation and/or continuous improvement respectively, what is rather surprising finding leading to many limitations both in theory and practice. Many methods, techniques and tools have been created and are more or less utilized for innovative thinking which can result in the solution of a problem and/or innovation. Two of them are SCAMPER elaborated by Eberle (1971) and ASIT developed by Horowitz (1999, 2001). Despite their relative simplicity and applicability in many areas of business and management, the knowledge of these methods cannot be assigned as the wide-spread and broadly used one. The proposed framework presented in this paper tries to combine the above mentioned approaches for the purpose of relatively simple idea generation for the improvement and innovation to reduce, eliminate or to solve in other way the problems with reverse flows. The rationale for this proposal lies in their simplicity, in the possibility to combine their elements together and their suitability for solving the rather specific problems related to returns. Review of existing literature on relevant issues served as the basis for the construction of the proposed framework. The paper complements missing piece of knowledge in reverse logistics and reverse supply chain by linking existing but separately applied approaches of quality management to innovative thinking and to reverse flows management into one framework. The framework could be applied in practice when dealing with reverse flows and looking for the possibility to find solution to problems occurring in internal value added processes and in forward supply chains that lead to the emergence of any kind of returns. However, the proposed framework needs the empirical testing in various settings and situation within reverse supply chain management and for the individual specific problems with returns studied by academicians to examine the logic of the framework.