The purpose of the paper is to empirically study firms’ practises of knowledge and intellectual property (IP) management in customer–supplier relationships. The work applies the qualitative methodology of multiple case studies, and the material was collected in semi-structured interviews with management personnel at 36 organisations in Finland and in the Netherlands. Almost every firm had innov...

The deregulation of the European energy market, combined with emerging advanced capabilities of information technology, provides strategic opportunities for new knowledge-oriented services on the power grid. HOMEBOTS is the name we have coined for one of these innovative services: decentralized power load management at the customer side, automatically carried out by a ‘society’ of interactive h...

Getting workers to share knowledge in situations where “knowledge” is the primary asset making them valuable is a pressing problem in many organizations – leading to what we call “the knowledge worker’s prisoner’s dilemma.” Interesting variants of this dilemma arise in the contexts of customer support and server system administration. We begin by describing some of the reasons why the uncoopera...

Today, healthcare has become a progressive industry with novel techniques, approaches and findings in this field quickly being evaluated and improved. One of these approaches is patient-centered care (PCC), which is defined essentially as an approach that respects and responds to individual patient’s preferences, needs and values. As such, PCC concept focuses not only on the disease, but also o...

In the knowledge centric business environment, knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating, accumulating and accessing the values from intangible assets. Owing to the fast development of information technology and the global reach of legal documents, patents, trademarks and copyrights, technical legal services, organizations are challenged to efficiently provide customized services. Th...

Customer input has become a valuable component of the innovation process. The integration of customer knowledge into the early innovation phase requires special types of customers and methods and entails specific risks according to each stage. This article describes when and how customers can be integrated and how possible negative side effects can be avoided. Relying on intensive desk research...