Organizing for Collective Competence - Increasing Competitiveness in Professional Service Firms

Purpose and goal

Organizing for Collective Competence - Increasing Competitiveness in Professional Service FirmsCompetitiveness in professional service firms is to a large extent a function of the ability to utilize and develop collective competencies. This project aims at developing concrete approaches and tools for developing organizations´ ability to exploit collective competencies in client assignments based on a view of competence as actors´ ability to, together with others, make sense of complex situations. We also view competence as originating in communities of practice. This emphasizes the importance of relations between actors within and between communities.

Results and expected effects

The ability to use and develop collective competence in action is viewed as dialectically related to both individual ability and willingness and conditioning structures and processes on client-project and organizational level. This R&D project will together with professional service firms explore this interplay and through interventions contribute to the creation of improved capabilities.

Approach and implementation

The project will be carried out in close collaboration with companies. It is designed in two phases, where the first phase aims at an assessment of the companies´ ability to integrate competencies and the second phase focuses on development projects in which new ways of integrating competencies are developed and tested.