Professional Productivization: New Concept Development as a Professional Art

This paper aims to further insight into the process of knowledge productivization within management consultancies. Consultants are often presented as main suppliers and commodifiers of management knowledge. However we argue that current accounts lack a view on the way new knowledge products are developed within consulting firms. By drawing on product innovation literature, this paper shows that the process of ‘new concept development’ is not simply a matter of constructing a marketable consulting product. Rather, efforts to establish a concept within a consultancy are often accompanied by considerable struggles and unavoidably require various professional skills.