Innovation in engineering consultancy: A case for competitive advantage

Abstract

The internationalisation of the engineering consultancy services brings new challenges to its competitiveness. Service innovation is the way to enhance competitiveness. Although competitive innovation in the 1990s was achieved by information and communication technologies adoption, it is no longer sustainable without the combination of entrepreneurship, learning, sharing, knowledge and creativity, and by using information and communication technologies as a tool. The firm and the individual face challenges from external perceptions, internal beliefs, institutional legacies and organisation cultural misalignments. This paper proposes a knowledge-based model for re-engineering the firm with a learning culture. If engineering consultancy is a knowledge-based business whose asset is the employees, then the firm has to manage knowledge in an organisational learning and sharing context for the innovation purpose. Knowledge management with a human resource strategy for learning is a means to leverage the know-how, experience and judgment of the pool of highly qualified labour to achieve the innovation objective by replacing irrelevant work routines with dynamic ones.